Style

STYLE

STYLE

BY

WALTER RALEIGH

AUTHOR OF 'THE ENGLISH NOVEL,'
AND 'ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, A CRITICAL ESSAY'

THIRD EDITION

LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD

•jpublisfjer to tfye Enfcta Office

37 BEDFORD STREET

1898

105

JOANNI SAMPSON

BIBLIOTHECARIO OPTIMO
VIBO OMNI SAPIENTIA JEGYPTIORUM

EBUDITO
LABOBUM ET ITINEBUM SUOBUM

SO CIO

HUNC LIBELLUM
D • D • D
AUCTOR

TABLE OF THE PRINCIPAL MATTERS
CONTAINED IN THIS ESSAY

PAGE

The Triumph of Letters 1

The Problem of Style 3

The Instrument and the Audience, with a Digression

on the Actor ....... 4

The Sense-Elements 8

The Functions of Sense 10

Picture ... .... 11

Melody 14

Meaning, Exampled in Negation . . . .17

The Weapons of Thought 21

The Analogy from Architecture .... 23

The Analogy Rectified. The Law of Change . . 24

The Good Slang 27

The Bad Slang 29

Archaism ........ 32

Romantic and Classic 36

The Palsy of Definition 39

Distinction 43

Assimilation 45

Synonyms 46

viii Style

PAGE

Variety of Expression 40

Variety Justified 50

Metaphor and Abstraction : Poetry and Science . 55
The Doctrine of the Mot Propre . .61

The Instrument 65

The Audience 65

The Relation of the Author to his Audience . . 71

The Poet and his Audience 71

Public Caterers .77

The Cautelous Man 78

Sentimentalism and Jocularity .... 81

The Tripe-Seller .83

The Wag 85

Social and Rhetorical Corruptions .... 87
Sincerity ... 88

Insincerity ... ... 93

Austerity 94

The Figurative Style .... .98

Decoration .100

Allusiveness . 102

Simplicity and Strength ... . 104

The Paradox of Letters 107

Drama .108

Implicit Drama .... .111

Words Again ...... . 115

Quotation .116

Appropriation . . . . . . . .119

The World of Words 123

The Teaching of Style . . . ^ . .124
The Conclusion 127

STYLE

STYLE

STYLE, the Latin name for an iron pen,jhas come The Triumph
to designate the art that handles, with ever fresh
vitality and wary alacrity, the fluid elements of
speech. By a figure, obvious enough, which yet
might serve for an epitome of literary method, the
most rigid and simplest of instruments has lent its
name to the subtlest and most flexible of arts.
Thence the application of the word has been ex-
tended to arts other than literature, to the whole
range of the activities of man. The fact that we
use the word " style " in speaking of architecture
and sculpture, painting and music, dancing, play-
acting, and cricket, that we can apply it to the
careful achievements of the housebreaker and the
poisoner, and to the spontaneous animal movements
of the limbs of man or beast, is the noblest of

2 Style

unconscious tributes to the faculty of letters. The
pen, scratching on wax or paper, has become the
symbol of all that is expressive, all that is intimate,
in human nature; not only arms and arts, but
man himself, has yielded to it. His living voice,
with its undulations and inflexions, assisted by
the mobile play of feature and an infinite variety
of bodily gesture, is driven to borrow dignity
from the same metaphor; the orator and the
actor are fain to be judged by style. "It is
most true," says the author of The Anatomy of
Melancholy, "stylus virum arguit^ our style be-
wrays us." Other gestures shift and change
and flit, this is the ultimate and enduring
revelation of personality. The actor and the
orator are condemned to work evanescent effects
on transitory material ; the dust that they write
on is blown about their graves. The sculptor and
the architect deal in less perishable ware, but the
stuff is recalcitrant and stubborn, and will not
take the impress of all states of the soul. Morals,
philosophy, and aesthetic, mood and conviction,
creed and whim, habit, passion, and demonstra-

Style 3

— what art but the art of literature admits
the entrance of all these, and guards them from
the suddenness of mortality? What other art
gives scope to natures and dispositions so diverse,
and to tastes so contrarious ? Euclid and
Shelley, Edmund Spenser and Herbert Spencer,
King David and David Hume, are all followers
of the art of letters.

In the effort to explain the principles of an art The Problem

of Style.

so bewildering in its variety, writers on style have
gladly availed themselves of analogy from the
other arts, and have spoken, for the most part,
not without a parable. It is a pleasant trick they
put upon their pupils, whom they gladden with
the delusion of a golden age, and perfection to be
sought backwards, in arts less complex. The
teacher of writing, past master in the juggling
craft of language, explains that he is only carrying
into letters the principles of counterpoint, or that
it is all a matter of colour and perspective, or that
structure and ornament are the beginning and
end of his intent. Professor of eloquence and of
thieving, his winged shoes remark him as he skips

4 Style

from metaphor to metaphor, not daring to trust
himself to the partial and frail support of any
single figure. He lures the astonished novice
through as many trades as were ever housed in
the central hall of the world's fair. From his dis-
tracting account of the business it would appear
that he is now building a monument, anon he is
painting a picture (with brushes dipped in a galli-
pot made of an earthquake) ; again he strikes a
keynote, weaves a pattern, draws a wire, drives a
nail, treads a measure, sounds a trumpet, or hits
a target; or skirmishes around his subject; or
lays it bare with a dissecting knife ; or embalms
a thought; or crucifies an enemy. What is he
really doing all the time ?

Thdnstru- Besides the artist two things are to be con-

ment and the

Audience, sidered in every art, — the instrument and the

fwith &

Digression audience ; or, to deal in less figured phrase, the
medium and the public. From both of these the
artist, if he would find freedom for the exercise of
all his powers, must sit decently aloof. It is the
misfortune of the actor, the singer, and the dancer,

Style 5

that their bodies are their sole instruments. On
to the stage of their activities they carry the heart
that nourishes them and the lungs wherewith
they breathe, so that the soul, to escape degrada-
tion, must seek a more remote and difficult privacy.
That immemorial right of the soul to make the
body its home, a welcome escape from publicity
and a refuge for sincerity, must be largely fore-
gone by the actor, who has scant liberty to decorate
and administer for his private behoof an apart-
ment that is also a place of business. His owner-
ship is limited by the necessities of his trade ;
when the customers are gone, he eats and sleeps
in the bar-parlour. Nor is the instrument of his
performances a thing of his choice ; the poorest
skill of the violinist may exercise itself upon a
Stradivarius, but the actor is reduced to fiddle for
the term of his natural life upon the face and
fingers that he got from his mother. The serene
detachment that may be achieved by disciples of
greater arts can hardly be his, applause touches
his personal pride too nearly, the mocking echoes
of derision infest the solitude of his retired ima-

6 Style

gination. In none of the world's great polities
has the practice of this art been found consistent
with noble rank or honourable estate. Chris-
tianity might be expected to spare some sympathy
for a calling that offers prizes to abandonment
and self-immolation, but her eye is fixed on a
more distant mark than the pleasure of the
populace, and, as in gladiatorial Rome of old, her
best efforts have been used to stop the games.
Society, on the other hand, preoccupied with the
art of life, has no warmer gift than patronage for
those whose skill and energy exhaust themselves
on the mimicry of life. The reward of social
consideration is refused, it is true, to all artists,
or accepted by them at their immediate peril.
By a natural adjustment, in countries where the
artist has sought and attained a certain modest
social elevation, the issue has been changed, and
the architect or painter, when his health is pro-
posed, finds himself, sorely against the grain,
returning thanks for the employer of labour, the
genial host, the faithful husband, the tender father,
and other pillars of society. The risk of too

Style 7

great familiarity with an audience which insists
on honouring the artist irrelevantly, at the ex-
pense of the art, must be run by all; a more
clinging evil besets the actor, in that he can at no
time wholly escape from his phantasmal second
self. On this creature of his art he has lavished
the last doit of human capacity for expression ;
with what bearing shall he face the exacting
realities of life? Devotion to his profession has
beggared him of his personalty; ague, old age
and poverty, love and death, find in him an
entertainer who plies them with a feeble repetition
of the triumphs formerly prepared for a larger
and less imperious audience. The very journalist
— though he, too, when his profession takes him
by the throat, may expound himself to his wife in
phrases stolen from his own leaders — is a miracle
of detachment in comparison ; he has not put his
laughter to sale. It is well for the souPs health
of the artist that a definite boundary should
separate his garden from his farm, so that when
he escapes from the conventions that rule his
work he may be free to recreate himself. But

8 Style

where shall the weary player keep holiday? Is
not all the world a stage ?
The Seme Whatever the chosen instrument of an art

Elements.

may be, its appeal to those whose attention it
bespeaks must be made through the senses.
Music, which works with the vibrations of a
material substance, makes this appeal through the
ear; painting through the eye; it is of a piece
w with the complexity of the literary art that it
employs both channels, — as it might seem to a
careless apprehension, indifferently.

For the writer's pianoforte is the dictionary,
words are the material in which he works, and
words may either strike the ear or be gathered
by the eye from the printed page. The alterna-
tive will, be called delusive, for, in European
literature at least, there is no word-symbol that
does not imply a spoken sound, and no excellence
without euphony. But the other way is possible,
the gulf between mind and mind may be bridged
by something which has a right to the name of
literature although it exacts no aid from the ear.
The picture-writing of the Indians, the hiero-

Style 9

glyphs of Egypt, may be cited as examples of
literary meaning conveyed with no implicit help
from the spoken word. Such an art, were it
capable of high development, would forsake the
kinship of melody, and depend for its sensual
elements of delight on the laws of decorative
pattern. In a land of deaf-mutes it might come
to a measure of perfection. But where human
intercourse is chiefly by speech, its connexion
with the interests and passions of daily life would
perforce be of the feeblest, it would tend more
and more to cast off the fetters of meaning that it
might do freer service to the jealous god of visible
beauty. The overpowering rivalry of speech
would rob it of all its symbolic intent and leave
its bare picture. Literature has favoured rather
the way of the ear and has given itself zealously
to the tuneful ordering of sounds. Let it be
repeated, therefore, that for the traffic of letters
the senses are but the door-keepers of the mind ;
none of them commands an only way of access, —
the deaf can read by sight, the blind by touch.
It is not amid the bustle of the live senses, but in

10 Style

an under-world of dead impressions that Poetry
works her will, raising that in power which was
sown in weakness, quickening a spiritual body
from the ashes of the natural body. The mind of
^ man is peopled, like some silent city, with a
sleeping company of reminiscences, associations,
impressions, attitudes, emotions, to be awakened
into fierce activity at the touch of words. By
one way or another, with a fanfaronnade of the
marching trumpets, or stealthily, by noiseless
passages and dark posterns, the troop of sug-
gesters enters the citadel, to do its work within.
The procession of beautiful sounds that is a poem
passes in through the main gate, and forthwith
the by-ways resound to the hurry of ghostly feet,
until the small company of adventurers is well-
nigh lost and overwhelmed in that throng of
insurgent spirits.

The To attempt to reduce the art of literature to

""stnse. its component sense-elements is therefore vain.

Memory, "the warder of the brain," is a fickle

trustee, whimsically lavish to strangers, giving up

to the appeal of a spoken word or unspoken

Style 11

symbol, an odour or a touch, all that has been
garnered by the sensitive capacities of man. It is
the part of the writer to play upon memory, con-
fusing what belongs to one sense with what
belongs to another, extorting images of colour at
a word, raising ideas of harmony without break-
ing the stillness of the air. He can lead on the
dance of words till their sinuous movements call
forth, as if by mesmerism, the likeness of some
adamantine rigidity, time is converted into space,
and music begets sculpture. To see for the sake
of seeing, to hear for the sake of hearing, are
subsidiary exercises of his complex metaphysical
art, to be counted among its rudiments. Picture '
and music can furnish but the faint beginnings of
a philosophy of letters. Necessary though they
be to a writer, they are transmuted in his service
to new forms, and made to further purposes not
their own.

The power of vision — hardly can a writer, least Picture.
of all if he be a poet, forego that part of his
equipment. In dealing with the impalpable, dim
subjects that lie beyond the border-land of exact

12 Style

knowledge, the poetic instinct seeks always to
bring them into clear definition and bright concrete
imagery, so that it might seem for the moment as
if painting also could deal with them. Every
abstract conception, as it passes into the light of
the creative imagination, acquires structure and
firmness and colour, as flowers do in the light of
the sun. Life and Death, Love and Youth, Hope
and Time, become persons in poetry, not that they
may wear the tawdry habiliments of the studio,
but because persons are the objects of the most
familiar sympathy and the most intimate know-
ledge.

How long, O Death ? And shall thy feet depart
Still a young child's with mine, or wilt thou stand

Full grown the helpful daughter of my heart,
AVTiat time with thee indeed I reach the strand

Of the pale wave which knows thee what thou art,
And drink it in the hollow of thy hand ?

And as a keen eye for the imagery attendant
on a word is essential to all writing, whether prose
or poetry, that attempts the heart, so languor of
the visual faculty can work disaster even in the
calm periods of philosophic expatiation. "It

Style 13

cannot be doubted," says one whose daily medita-
tions enrich The People's Post-Bag^ "that Fear
is, to a great extent, the mother of Cruelty."
Alas, by the introduction of that brief proviso,
conceived in a spirit of admirably cautious self-
defence, the writer has unwittingly given himself
to the horns of a dilemma whose ferocity nothing
can mitigate. These tempered and conditional
truths are not in nature, which decrees, with un-
compromising dogmatism, that either a woman is
one's mother, or she is not. The writer probably
meant merely that " fear is one of the causes of
cruelty," and had he used a colourless abstract
word the platitude might pass unchallenged. But
a vague desire for the emphasis and glamour
of literature having brought in the word " mother,""
has yet failed to set the sluggish imagination to
work, and a word so glowing with picture and
vivid with sentiment is damped and dulled by the
thumb-mark of besotted usage to mean no more
than " cause " or " occasion." Only for the poet,
perhaps, are words live winged things, flashing
with colour and laden with scent ; yet one poor

H Style

spark of imagination might save them from this
sad descent to sterility and darkness.

Melody. Of no less import is the power of melody, which

chooses, rejects, and orders words for the satisfac-
tion that a cunningly varied return of sound can
give to the ear. Some critics have amused them-
selves with the hope that here, in the laws and
practices regulating the audible cadence of words,
may be found the first principles of style, the form
which fashions the matter, the apprenticeship to
beauty which alone can make an art of truth.
And it may be admitted that verse, owning, as
it does, a professed and canonical allegiance to
music, sometimes carries its devotion so far that
thought swoons into melody, and the thing said
seems a discovery made by the way in the search
for tuneful expression.

What thing unto mine ear
Wouldst thou convey, — what secret thing,
O wandering water ever whispering ?
Surely thy speech shall be of her,
Thou water, O thou whispering wanderer,
What message dost thou bring ?

In this stanza an exquisitely modulated tune

Style 15

is played upon the syllables that make up the
word "wandering," even as, in the poem from
which it is taken, there is every echo of the noise
of waters laughing in sunny brooks, or moaning
in dumb hidden caverns. Yet even here it would
be vain to seek for reason why each particular
sound of every line should be itself and no other.
For melody holds no absolute dominion over
either verse or prose ; its laws, never to be dis-
regarded, prohibit rather than prescribe. Beyond
the simple ordinances that determine the place
of the rhyme in verse, and the average number of
syllables, or rhythmical beats, that occur in the
line, where shall laws be found to regulate the
sequence of consonants and vowels from syllable
to syllable ? Those few artificial restrictions,
which verse invents for itself, once agreed on, a
necessary and perilous license makes up the rest
of the code. Literature can never conform to
the dictates of pure euphony, while grammar,
which has been shaped not in the interests of
prosody, but for the service of thought, bars the
way with its clumsy inalterable polysyllables and

16 Style

the monotonous sing-song of its inflexions. On
the other hand, among a hundred ways of saying
a thing, there are more than ninety that a care
for euphony may reasonably forbid. All who
have consciously practised the art of writing know
what endless and painful vigilance is needed for
the avoidance of the unfit or untuneful phrase,
how the meaning must be tossed from expression
to expression, mutilated and deceived, ere it can
find rest in words. The stupid accidental recur-
rence of a single broad vowel ; the cumbrous
repetition of a particle; the emphatic phrase
for which no emphatic place can be found with-
out disorganising the structure of the period;
the pert intrusion on a solemn thought of a flight
of short syllables, twittering like a flock of
sparrows ; or that vicious trick of sentences
whereby each, unmindful of its position and
duties, tends to imitate the deformities of its
predecessor; — these are a select few of the diffi-
culties that the nature of language and of man
conspire to put upon the writer. He is well
served by his mind and ear if he can win past all

Style 17

such traps and ambuscades, robbed of only a
little of his treasure, indemnified by the careless
generosity of his spoilers, and still singing.

Besides their chime in the ear, and the images Meaning,

exampled in

that they put before the mind's eye, words have, Negation,
for their last and greatest possession, a meaning.
They carry messages and suggestions that, in the
effect wrought, elude all the senses equally. For
the sake of this, their prime office, the rest is
many times forgotten or scorned, the tune is
disordered and havoc played with the lineaments
of the picture, because without these the word
can still do its business. The refutation of those
critics who, in their analysis of the power of
literature, make much of music and picture, is
contained in the most moving passages that have
found utterance from man. Consider the intensity
of a saying like that of St. Paul : — " For I am
persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels,
nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present,
nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any
other creature, shall be able to separate us from the
love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

18 Style

Do these verses draw their power from a
skilful arrangement of vowel and consonant ? But
they are quoted from a translation, and can be
translated otherwise, well or ill or indifferently,
without losing more than a little of their virtue.
Do they impress the eye by opening before it a
prospect of vast extent, peopled by vague shapes ?
On the contrary, the visual embodiment of the
ideas suggested kills the sense of the passage, by
lowering the cope of the starry heavens to the
measure of a poplar-tree. Death and life, height
and depth, are conceived by the apostle, and
creation thrown in like a trinket, only that they
may lend emphasis to the denial that is the soul of
his purpose. Other arts can affirm, or seem to
affirm, with all due wealth of circumstance and
detail ; they can heighten their affirmation by the
modesty of reserve, the surprises of a studied
brevity, and the erasure of all impertinence;
literature alone can deny, and honour the denial
with the last resources of a power that has the
universe for its treasury. It is this negative
capability of words, their privative force, whereby

Style 19

they can impress the minds with a sense of
"vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence," that
Burke celebrates in the fine treatise of his younger
days. In such a phrase as "the angel of the
Lord " language mocks the positive rivalry of the
pictorial art, which can offer only the poor
pretence of an equivalent in a young man painted
with wings. But the difference between the two
arts is even better marked in the matter of
negative suggestion; it is instanced by Burke
from the noble passage where Virgil describes the
descent of ^Eneas and the Sibyl to the shades of
the nether world. Here are amassed all "the
images of a tremendous dignity" that the poet
could forge from the sublime of denial. The two
most famous lines are a procession of negatives : —

Ibant obscuri sola sub node per umbram,
Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna.

Through hollow kingdoms, emptied of the day,
And dim, deserted courts where Dis bears sway,

Night-foundered, and uncertain of the path,
Darkling they took their solitary way.

Here is the secret of some of the cardinal

20 Style

effects of literature ; strong epithets like " lonely ,"
"supreme," "invisible,"" "eternal," "inexorable,"
with the substantives that belong to them, borrow
their force from the vastness of what they deny.
And not these alone, but many other words, less
indebted to logic for the magnificence of reach
that it can lend, bring before the mind no picture,
but a dim emotional framework. Such words as
"ominous," "fantastic," "attenuated," "bewil-
dered," "justification," are atmospheric rather
than pictorial ; they infect the soul with the
passion - laden air that rises from humanity.
It is precisely in his dealings with words like
these, " heated originally by the breath of others,"
that a poet's fine sense and knowledge most avail
him. The company a word has kept, its history,
faculties, and predilections, endear or discommend
it to his instinct. How hardly will poetry consent
to employ such words as "congratulation" or
"philanthropist," — words of good origin, but
tainted by long immersion in fraudulent rejoicings
and pallid, comfortable, theoretic loves. How
eagerly will the poetic imagination seize on a word

Style 21

like "control," which gives scope by its very
vagueness, and is fettered by no partiality of
association. All words, the weak and the strong,
the definite and the vague, have their offices to
perform in language, but the loftiest purposes of
poetry are seldom served by those explicit hard 7
words which, like tiresome explanatory persons, say
all that they mean. Only in the focus and centre
of man's knowledge is there place for the hammer-
blows of affirmation, the rest is a flickering world
of hints and half-lights, echoes and suggestions, to
be come at in the dusk or not at all.

The combination of these powers in words, of

of Thought.

song and image and meaning, has given us the
supreme passages of our romantic poetry. In
Shakespeare's work, especially, the union of vivid
definite presentment with immense reach of meta-
physical suggestion seems to intertwine the roots
of the universe with the particular fact ; tempting
the mind to explore that other side of the idea
presented to it, the side turned away from it, and
held by something behind.

22 Style

It will have blood ; they say blood will have blood :
Stones have been known to move and trees to speak ;
Augurs and understood relations have
By maggot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth
The secret'st man of blood.

This meeting of concrete and abstract, of sense
and thought, keeps the eye travelling along the
utmost skyline of speculation, where the heavens
are interfused with the earth. In short, the third
and greatest virtue of words is no other than the
virtue that belongs to the weapons of thought, —
a deep, wide, questioning thought that discovers
analogies and pierces behind things to a half-
perceived unity of law and essence. In the
employ of keen insight, high feeling, and deep
thinking, language comes by its own ; the pretti-
nesses that may be imposed on a passive material
are as nothing to the splendour and grace that
transfigure even the meanest instrument when it
is wielded by the energy of thinking purpose.
The contempt that is cast, by the vulgar phrase,
on " mere words " bears witness to the rarity of
this serious consummation. Yet by words the
world was shaped out of chaos, by words the

Style 23

Christian religion was established among mankind.
Are these terrific engines fit play-things for the
idle humours of a sick child ?

And now it begins to be apparent that no The Analogy

. o*1 Archi-

adequate description of the art of language can
be drawn from the technical terminology of the
other arts, which, like proud debtors, would gladly
pledge their substance to repay an obligation that
they cannot disclaim. Let one more attempt
to supply literature with a parallel be quoted
from the works of a writer on style, whose high
merit it is that he never loses sight, either in
theory or in practice, of the fundamental con-
ditions proper to the craft of letters. Robert
Louis Stevenson, pondering words long and
lovingly, was impressed by their crabbed indi-
viduality, and sought to elucidate the laws of their
arrangement by a reference to the principles of
architecture. "The sister arts," he says, "enjoy
the use of a plastic and ductile material, like the
modeller's clay ; literature alone is condemned to
work in mosaic with finite and quite rigid words.
You have seen those blocks, dear to the nursery :

24 Style

this one a pillar, that a pediment, a third a
window or a vase. It is with blocks of just such
arbitrary size and figure that the literary architect
is condemned to design the palace of his art.
Nor is this all; for since these blocks or words
are the acknowledged currency of our daily affairs,
there are here possible none of those suppressions
by which other arts obtain relief, continuity, and
vigour: no hieroglyphic touch, no smoothed
impasto, no inscrutable shadow, as in painting ; no
blank wall, as in architecture; but every word,
phrase, sentence, and paragraph must move in a
logical progression, and convey a definite con-
ventional import."
The Analogy It is an acute comparison, happily indicative

Rectified.

The Law of of the morose angularity that words offer to who-

Change.

so handles them, admirably insistent on the chief
of the incommodities imposed upon the writer,
the necessity, at all times and at all costs, to
mean something. The boon of the recurring
monotonous expanse, that an apprentice may fill,
the breathing-space of restful mechanical repetition,
are denied to the writer, who must needs shoulder

Style 25

the hod himself, and lay on the mortar, in ever
varying patterns, with his own trowel. This is
indeed the ordeal of the master, the canker-worm
of the penny-a-liner, who, poor fellow, means
nothing, and spends his life in the vain effort to
get words to do the same. But if in this respect
architecture and literature are confessed to differ,
there remains the likeness that Mr. Stevenson
detects in the building materials of the two arts,
those blocks of " arbitrary size and figure ; finite
and quite rigid." There is truth enough in the
comparison to make it illuminative, but he would
be a rash dialectician who should attempt to draw
from it, by way of inference, a philosophy of
letters. Words are piled on words, and bricks on
bricks, but of the two you are invited to think
words the more intractable. Truly, it was a man
of letters who said it, avenging himself on his
profession for the never-ending toil it imposed,
by miscalling it, with grim pleasantry, the archi-
tecture of the nursery. Finite and quite rigid
words are not, in any sense that holds good of
bricks. They move and change, they wax and

26 Style

wane, they wither and burgeon ; from age to age,
from place to place, from mouth to mouth, they
are never at a stay. They take on colour, inten-
sity, and vivacity from the infection of neighbour-
hood; the same word is of several shapes and
diverse imports in one and the same sentence;
they depend on the building that they compose
for the very chemistry of the stuff that composes
them. The same epithet is used in the phrases
"a fine day" and "fine irony," in "fair trade"
and " a fair goddess." Were different symbols to
be invented for these sundry meanings the art of
literature would perish. For words carry with
them all the meanings they have worn, and the
writer shall be judged by those that he selects for
prominence in the train of his thought. A slight
technical implication, a faint tinge of archaism, in
the common turn of speech that you employ, and
in a moment you have shaken off the mob that
scours the rutted highway, and are addressing a
select audience of ticket-holders with closed doors.
A single natural phrase of peasant speech, a direct
physical sense given to a word that genteel

Style 27

parlance authorises readily enough in its meta-
phorical sense, and at a touch you have blown the
roof off the drawing-room of the villa, and have
set its obscure inhabitants wriggling in the
unaccustomed sun. In choosing a sense for your
words you choose also an audience for them.

To one word, then, there are many meanings, I v
according as it falls in the sentence, according as
its successive ties and associations are broken or
renewed. And here, seeing that the stupidest of Tke c
all possible meanings is very commonly the slang
meaning, it will be well to treat briefly of slang.
For slang, in the looser acceptation of the term,
is of two kinds, differing, and indeed diametrically
opposite, in origin and worth. Sometimes it is
the technical diction that has perforce been
coined to name the operations, incidents, and
habits of some way of life that society de-
spises or deliberately elects to disregard. This
sort of slang, which often invents names for what
would otherwise go nameless, is vivid, accurate,
and necessary, an addition of wealth to the
world's dictionaries and of compass to the world's

28 Style

range of thought. Society, mistily conscious
of the sympathy that lightens in any habitual
name, seems to have become aware, by one of
those wonderful processes of chary instinct which
serve the great, vulnerable, timid organism in lieu
of a brain, that to accept of the pickpocket his
names for the mysteries of his trade is to accept
also a new moral stand-point and outlook on the
question of property. For this reason, and by
no special masonic precautions of his own, the pick-
pocket is allowed to keep the admirable devices of
his nomenclature for the familiar uses of himself
and his mates, until a Villon arrives to prove that
this language, too, was awaiting the advent of its
bully and master. In the meantime, what direct-
ness and modest sufficiency of utterance distin-
guishes the dock compared with the fumbling pro-
lixity of the old gentleman on the bench ! It is
the trite story, — romanticism forced to plead at the
bar of classicism fallen into its dotage, Keats judged
by Blackwood, Wordsworth exciting the pained
astonishment of Miss Anna Seward. Accuser and
accused alike recognise that a question of diction

Style 29

is part of the issue between them ; hence the
picturesque confession of the culprit, made in
proud humility, that he " clicked a red 'un "
must needs be interpreted, to save the good faith
of the court, into the vaguer and more general
speech of the classic convention. Those who
dislike to have their watches stolen find that the
poorest language of common life will serve their
simple turn, without the rich technical additions
of a vocabulary that has grown around an art.
They can abide no rendering of the fact that does
not harp incessantly on the disapproval of watch-
owners. They carry their point of morals at the
cost of foregoing all glitter and finish in the
matter of expression.

This sort of slang, therefore, technical in origin,
the natural efflorescence of highly cultivated
agilities of brain, and hand, and eye, is worthy
of all commendation. But there is another kind
that goes under the name of slang, the offspring
rather of mental sloth, and current chiefly among
those idle, jocular classes to whom all art is a bug-
bear and a puzzle. There is a public for every

30 Style

one ; the pottle-headed lout who in a moment of
exuberance strikes on a new sordid metaphor for
any incident in the beaten round of drunkenness,
lubricity, and debt, can set his fancy rolling
through the music-halls, and thence into the
street, secure of applause and a numerous sodden
discipleship. Of the same lazy stamp, albeit more
amiable in effect, are the thought - saving con-
trivances whereby one word is retained to do the
work of many. For the language of social inter-
course ease is the first requisite ; the average
talker, who would be hard put to it if he were
called on to describe or to define, must constantly
be furnished with the materials of emphasis, where-
with to drive home his likes and dislikes. Why
should he alienate himself from the sympathy of
his fellows by affecting a singularity in the ex-
pression of his emotions ? What he craves is not
accuracy, but immediacy of expression, lest the
tide of talk should flow past him, leaving him
engaged in a belated analysis. Thus the word of
the day is on all lips, and what was " vastly fine "
last century is " awfully jolly " now ; the meaning

Style 31

is the same, the expression equally inappropriate.
Oaths have their brief periods of ascendency, and
philology can boast its fashion-plates. The
tyrant Fashion, who wields for whip the fear of
solitude, is shepherd to the flock of common
talkers, as they run hither and thither pursuing,
not self-expression, the prize of letters, but
unanimity and self -obliteration, the marks of
good breeding. Like those famous modern poets
who are censured by the author of Paradise Lost,
the talkers of slang are " carried away by custom,
to express many things otherwise, and for the
most part worse than else they would have
exprest them."" The poverty of their vocabulary
makes appeal to the brotherly sympathy of a
partial and like-minded auditor, who can fill out
their paltry conventional sketches from his own
experience of the same events. Within the limits
of a single school, or workshop, or social circle,
slang may serve ; just as, between friends, silence
may do the work of talk. There are few families,
or groups of familiars, that have not some small
coinage of this token-money, issued and accepted

32 Style

by affection, passing current only within those
narrow and privileged boundaries. This wealth
is of no avail to the travelling mind, save as a
memorial of home, nor is its material such " as,
buried once, men want dug up again." A few
happy words and phrases, promoted, for some
accidental fitness, to the wider world of letters,
are all that reach posterity; the rest pass into
oblivion with the other perishables of the age.

A profusion of words used in an ephemeral
slang sense is evidence, then, that the writer
addresses himself merely to the uneducated and
thoughtless of his own day ; the revival of bygone
meanings, on the other hand, and an archaic turn
given to language is the mark rather of authors
who are ambitious of a hearing from more than
one age. The accretions of time bring round a
word many reputable meanings, of which the
oldest is like to be the deepest in grain. It is a
counsel of perfection — some will say, of vain-
glorious pedantry — but that shaft flies furthest
which is drawn to the head, and he who desires to
be understood in the twenty-fourth century will

Style 33

not be careless of the meanings that his words
inherit from the fourteenth. To know them is
of service, if only for the piquancy of avoiding
them. But many times they cannot wisely be
avoided, and the auspices under which a word
began its career when first it was imported from
the French or Latin overshadow it and haunt it to
the end.

Popular modern usage will often rob common
words, like "nice," "quaint," or "silly," of all
flavour of their origin, as if it were of no moment
to remember that these three words, at the outset
of their history, bore the older senses of " ignorant,"
"noted," and "blessed." It may be granted that
any attempt to return to these older senses, regard-
less of later implications, is stark pedantry ; but a
delicate writer will play shyly with the primitive
significance in passing, approaching it and circling
it, taking it as a point of reference or departure.
The early faith of Christianity, its beautiful cult
of childhood, and its appeal to unlearned sim-
plicity, have left their mark on the meaning of
" silly" ; the history of the word is contained in that

34 Style

cry of St. Augustine, Indoctl surgunt et rapiunt
coelum, or in the fervent sentence of the author of
the Imitation, Oportetjieri stultum. And if there is
a later silliness, altogether unblest, the skilful arti-
ficer of words, while accepting this last extension,
will show himself conscious of his paradox. So
also he will shun the grossness that employs the
epithet "quaint" to put upon subtlety and the
devices of a studied workmanship an imputation of
eccentricity ; or, if he falls in with the populace in
this regard, he will be careful to justify his
innuendo. The slipshod use of " nice " to connote
any sort of pleasurable emotion he will take care,
in his writings at least, utterly to abhor. From
the daintiness of elegance to the arrogant disgust
of folly the word carries meanings numerous and
diverse enough ; it must not be cruelly burdened
with all the laudatory occasions of an undiscrim-
inating egotism.

It would be easy to cite a hundred other words
like these, saved only by their nobler uses in
literature from ultimate defacement. The higher
standard imposed upon the written word tends to

Style 35

raise and purify speech also, and since talkers owe
the same debt to writers of prose that these, for
their part, owe to poets, it is the poets who must
be accounted chief protectors, in the last resort, of
our common inheritance. Every page of the
works of that great exemplar of diction, Milton, is
crowded with examples of felicitous and exquisite
meaning given to the infallible word. Sometimes he
accepts the secondary and more usual meaning of a
word only to enrich it by the interweaving of the
primary and etymological meaning. Thus the
seraph Abdiel, in the passage that narrates his
offer of combat to Satan, is said to " explore " his
own undaunted heart, and there is no sense of
" explore " that does not heighten the description
and help the thought. Thus again, when the
poet describes those

Eremites and friars,
White, Black, and Gray, with all their trumpery,

who inhabit, or are doomed to inhabit, the Paradise
of Fools, he seems to invite the curious reader to
recall the derivation of " trumpery,'" and so supple-
ment the idea of worthlessness with that other

36 Style

idea, equally grateful to the author, of deceit.
The strength that extracts this multiplex resonance
of meaning from a single note is matched by the
grace that gives to Latin words like "secure,"
" arrive," " obsequious,'1 " redound," " infest," and
" solemn " the fine precision of intent that art can
borrow from scholarship.

Such an exactitude is consistent with vital
change; Milton himself is bold to write "stood
praying" for "continued kneeling in prayer," and
deft to transfer the application of " schism " from
the rent garment of the Church to those necessary
" dissections made in the quarry and in the timber
ere the house of God can be built." Words may
safely veer to every wind that blows, so they keep
within hail of their cardinal meanings, and drift
not beyond the scope of their central employ, but
when once they lose hold of that, then, indeed, the
anchor has begun to drag, and the beach-comber

may expect his harvest.

* i
Romantic Fixity in the midst of change, fluctuation at

andCla»lc.\

'the heart of sameness, such is the estate of lan-
guage. According as they endeavour to reduce

Style 37

letters to some large haven and abiding-place of
civility, or prefer to throw in their lot with the
centrifugal tendency and ride on the flying crest
of change, are writers dubbed Classic or Romantic.
The Romantics are individualist, anarchic; the
strains of their passionate incantation raise no
cities to confront the wilderness in guarded sym-
metry, but rather bring the stars shooting from
their spheres, and draw wild things captive to a
voice. To them Society and Law seem dull phan-
toms, by the light cast from a flaming soul. They
dwell apart, and torture their lives in the effort to
attain to self-expression. All means and modes
offered them by language they seize on greedily,
and shape them to this one end ; they ransack the
vocabulary of new sciences, and appropriate or
invent strange jargons. They furbish up old
words or weld together new indifferently, that
they may possess the machinery of their speech
and not be possessed by it. They are at odds
with the idiom of their country in that it serves
the common need, and hunt it through all its
metamorphoses to subject it to their private will.

38 Style

Heretics by profession, they are everywhere opposed
to the party of the Classics, who move by slower
ways to ends less personal, but in no wise easier of
attainment. The magnanimity of the Classicjdeal
has had scant justice done to it by modern criti-
cism. To make literature the crowning symbol
of a world- wide civilisation ; to roof in the ages,
and unite the elect of all time in the courtesy of
one shining assembly, paying duty to one un-
questioned code ; to undo the work of Babel, and
knit together in a single community the scattered
efforts of mankind towards order and reason ; — this
was surely an aim worthy of labour and sacrifice.
Both have been freely given, and the end is yet to
seek. The self-assertion of the recusants has found
eulogists in plenty, but who has celebrated the
self-denial that was thrown away on this other
task, which is farther from fulfilment now than it
was when the scholars of the Renaissance gave up
their patriotism and the tongue of their childhood
in the name of fellow-citizenship with the ancients
and the oecumenical authority of letters ? Scholars,
grammarians, wits, and poets were content to bury

Style 39

the lustre of their wisdom and the hard-won fruits
of their toil in the winding-sheet of a dead lan-
guage, that they might be numbered with the family
of Cicero, and added to the pious train of Virgil.
It was a noble illusion, doomed to failure, the
versatile genius of language cried out against the
monotony of their Utopia, and the crowds who
were to people the unbuilded city of their dreams
went straying after the feathered chiefs of the
rebels, who, when the fulness of time was come,
themselves received apotheosis and the honours of
a new motley pantheon. The tomb of that great

vision bears for epitaph the ironical inscription

.
which defines a Classic poet as " a dead Romantic.1'

In truth the Romantics are right, and the The Pahy

ofDefinition.

serenity of the classic ideal is the serenity of
paralysis and[ death. A universal agreement in
the use of words facilitates communication, but, so
inextricably is expression entangled with feeling, it
leaves nothing to communicate. Inanity dogs the
footsteps of the classic tradition, which is every-
where lackeyed, through a long decline, by the pallor
of reflected glories. Even the irresistible novelty

40 Style

of personal experience is dulled by being cast in
the old matrix, and the man who professes to find
the whole of himself in the Bible or in Shake-
speare had as good not be. He is a replica and a
shadow, a foolish libel on his Creator, who, from
the beginning of time, was never guilty of
tautology. This is the error of the classical
creed, to imagine that in a fleeting world, where
the quickest eye can never see the same thing
twice, and a deed once done can never be repeated,
language alone should be capable of fixity and
finality. Nature avenges herself on those who
would thus make her prisoner, their truths
degenerate to truisms, and feeling dies in the ice-
palaces that they build to house it. In their
search for permanence they become unreal,
abstract, didactic, lovers of generalisation,
cherishers of the dry bones of life; their art is
transformed into a science, their expression into an
academic terminology. Immutability is their ideal,
and they find it in the arms of death. Words
must change to live, and a word once fixed
becomes useless for the purposes of art. Whoso-

Style 41

ever would make acquaintance with the goal
towards which the classic practice tends, should
seek it in the vocabulary of the Sciences. There
words are fixed and dead, a botanical collection of
colourless, scentless, dried weeds, a hortus siccus of
proper names, each individual symbol poorly
tethered to some single object or idea. No wind
blows through that garden, and no sun shines on
it, to discompose the melancholy workers at their
task of tying Latin labels on to withered sticks.
Definition and division are the watchwords of
science, where art is all for composition and
creation. Not that the exact definable sense of a
word is of no value to the stylist ; he profits by it
as a painter profits by a study of anatomy, or an
architect by a knowledge of the strains and
stresses that may be put on his material. The
exact logical definition is often necessary for the
structure of his thought and the ordering of his
severer argument. But often, too, it is the
merest beginning; when a word is once defined
he overlays it with fresh associations and buries
it under new-found moral significances, which may

42 Style

belie the definition they conceal. This is the
burden of Jeremy Bentham's quarrel with
" question-begging appellatives." A clear-sighted
and scrupulously veracious philosopher, abettor
of the age of reason, apostle of utility, god-father
of the panopticon, and donor to the English
dictionary of such unimpassioned vocables as
"codification" and "international," Bentham
would have been glad to purify the language
by purging it of those "affections of the soul"
wherein Burke had found its highest glory. Yet
in censuring the ordinary political usage of such a
word as " innovation," it was hardly prejudice in
general that he attacked, but the particular and
deep-seated prejudice against novelty. The sur-
prising vivacity of many of his own figures, —
although he had the courage of his convictions,
and laboured, throughout the course of a long life,
to desiccate his style, — bears witness to a natural ,
skill in the use of loaded weapons. He will pack
his text with grave argument on matters ecclesias-
tical, and indulge himself and literature, in the
notes, with a pleasant description of the flesh and

Style 43

the spirit playing leap-frog, now one up, now the
other, around the holy precincts of the Church.
Lapses like these show him far enough from his
own ideal of a geometric fixity in the use of words.
The claim of reason and logic to enslave language
has a more modern advocate in the philosopher
who denies all utility to a word while it retains
traces of its primary sensuous employ. The tickling
of the senses, the raising of the passions, these
things do indeed interfere with the arid business of
definition. None the less they are the life's breath
of literature, and he is a poor stylist who cannot
beg half-a-dozen questions in a single epithet, or
state the conclusion he would fain avoid in terms
that startle the senses into clamorous revolt.

The two main processes of change in words are Distinction.
Distinction and Assimilation. Endless fresh dis-
tinction, to match the infinite complexity of
things, is the concern of the writer, who spends
all his skill on the endeavour to cloth the delicacies
of perception and thought with a neatly fitting
garment. So words grow and bifurcate, diverge
and dwindle, until one root has many branches.

44 Style

Grammarians tell how " royal " and " regal " grew
up by the side of " kingly,*" how " hospital,""
"hospice,*" "hostel,*" and "hotel*" have come by
their several offices. The inventor of the word
" sensuous *" gave to the English people an oppor-
tunity of reconsidering those headstrong moral
preoccupations which had already ruined the
meaning of "sensual*" for the gentler uses of a
poet. Not only the Puritan spirit, but every
special bias or interest of man seizes on words to
appropriate them to itself. Practical men of
business transfer such words as "debenture*" or
" commodity *" from debt or comfort in general to
the palpable concrete symbols of debt or comfort ;
and in like manner doctors, soldiers, lawyers,
shipmen, — all whose interest and knowledge are
centred on some particular craft or profession,
drag words from the general store and adapt
them to special uses. Such words are sometimes
reclaimed from their partial applications by the
authority of men of letters, and pass back into
their wider meanings enhanced by a new element
of graphic association. Language never suffers

Style 45

by answering to an intelligent demand; it is
indebted not only to great authors, but to all
whom any special skill or taste has qualified to
handle it. The good writer may be one who
disclaims all literary pretension, but there he is,
at work among words, — binding the vagabond or
liberating the prisoner, exalting the humble or
abashing the presumptuous, incessantly alert to
amend their implications, break their lazy habits,
and help them to refinement or scope or decision.
He educates words, for he knows that they are
alive.

Compare now the case of the ruder multitude.
In the regard of literature, as a great critic long
ago remarked, " all are the multitude ; only they
differ in clothes, not in judgment or understand-
ing," and the poorest talkers do not inhabit the
slums. Wherever thought and taste have fallen
to be menials, there the vulgar dwell. How
should they gain mastery over language ? They
are introduced to a vocabulary of some hundred
thousand words, which quiver through a million
of meanings ; the wealth is theirs for the taking,

46 Style

and they are encouraged to be spendthrift by the
very excess of what they inherit. The resources of
the tongue they speak are subtler and more various
than ever their ideas can put to use. So begins
the process of assimilation, the edge put upon
words by the craftsman is blunted by the rough
treatment of the confident booby, who is well
pleased when out of many highly-tempered swords
he has manufactured a single clumsy coulter. A
dozen expressions to serve one slovenly meaning
inflate him with the sense of luxury and pomp.
"Vast," "huge," "immense," "gigantic," "enor-
mous," " tremendous," " portentous," and such-like
groups of words, lose all their variety of sense in
a barren uniformity of low employ. The reign of
this democracy annuls differences of status, and
insults over differences of ability or disposition.
Thus do synonyms, or many words ill applied to
one purpose, begin to flourish, and, for a last
indignity, dictionaries of synonyms.

Let the truth be said outright : there are no
synonyms, and the same statement can never be
repeated in a changed form of words. Where the

Style 47

ignorance of one writer has introduced an unneces-
sary word into the language, to fill a place already
occupied, the quicker apprehension of others will
fasten upon it, drag it apart from its fellows, and
find new work for it to do. Where a dull eye sees
nothing but sameness, the trained faculty of ob-
servation will discern a hundred differences worthy
of scrupulous expression. The old foresters had
different names for a buck during each successive
year of its life, distinguishing the fawn from the
pricket, the pricket from the sore, and so forth,
as its age increased. Thus it is also in that illimit-
able but not trackless forest of moral distinctions.
Language halts far behind the truth of things, and
only a drowsy perception can fail to devise a use
for some new implement of description. Every
strange word that makes its way into a language
spins for itself a web of usage and circumstance,
relating itself from whatsoever centre to fresh
points in the circumference. No two words ever
coincide throughout their whole extent. If some-
times good writers are found adding epithet to
epithet for the same quality, and name to name

48 Style

for the same thing, it is because they despair of
capturing their meaning at a venture, and so
practise to get near it by a maze of approxima-
tions. Or, it may be, the generous breadth of
their purpose scorns the minuter differences of
related terms, and includes all of one affinity, fear-
ing only lest they be found too few and too weak
to cover the ground effectively. Of this sort are
the so-called synonyms of the Prayer-Book, where-
in we " acknowledge and confess " the sins we are
forbidden to " dissemble or cloke " ; and the bead-
roll of the lawyer, who huddles together "give,
devise, and bequeath," lest the cunning of liti-
gants should evade any single verb. The works
of the poets yield still better instances. When
Milton praises the Virtuous Young Lady of his
sonnet in that the spleen of her detractors moves
her only to " pity and ruth," it is not for the idle
filling of the line that he joins the second of these
nouns to the first. Rather he is careful to enlarge
and intensify his meaning by drawing on the
stores of two nations, the one civilised, the other
barbarous; and ruth is a quality as much more

Style 49

instinctive and elemental than pity as pitilessness
is keener, harder, and more deliberate than the
inborn savagery of ruthlessness.

It is not chiefly, however, for the purposes of rariey of

Expression.

this accumulated and varied emphasis that the
need of synonyms is felt. There is no more curious
problem in the philosophy of style than that
afforded by the stubborn reluctance of writers, the
good as well as the bad, to repeat a word or
phrase. When the thing is, they may be willing
to abide by the old rule and say the word, but
when the thing repeats itself they will seldom
allow the word to follow suit. A kind of inter-
dict, not removed until the memory of the first
occurrence has faded, lies on a once used word.
The causes of this anxiety for a varied expression
are manifold. Where there is merely a column to
fill, poverty of thought drives the hackney author \y
into an illicit fulness, until the trick of verbiage
passes from his practice into his creed, and makes
him the dupe of his own puppets. A common-
place book, a dictionary of synonyms, and another
of phrase and fable equip him for his task ; if he

so Style

be called upon to marshal his ideas on the question
whether oysters breed typhoid, he will acquit him-
self voluminously, with only one allusion (it is a
point of pride) to the oyster by name. He will
compare the succulent bivalve to Pandora's box,
and lament that it should harbour one of the
direst of ills that flesh is heir to. He will find a
paradox and an epigram in the notion that the
darling of Apicius should suffer neglect under
the frowns of ^Esculapius. Question, hypothesis,
lamentation, and platitude dance their allotted
round and fill the ordained space, while Ignorance
masquerades in the garb of criticism, and Folly
proffers her ancient epilogue of chastened hope.
When all is said, nothing is said ; and Montaigne's
Que s^ais-je^ besides being briefer and wittier, was
infinitely more informing.

ty But we dwell too long with disease ; the writer
e . nourish^ on thought, whose nerves are braced and

, / his loins girt to struggle with a real meaning, is
not subject to these tympanies. He feels no idola-
trous dread of repetition when the theme requires
it, and is urged by no necessity of concealing real

Style 51

identity under a show of change. Nevertheless he,
too, is hedged about by conditions that compel
him, now and again, to resort to what seems a
synonym. The chief of these is the indispensable
law of euphony, which governs the sequence not
only of words, but also of phrases. In proportion
as a phrase is memorable, the words that compose
it become mutually adhesive, losing for a time
something of their individual scope, bringing with
them, if they be torn away too quickly, some
cumbrous fragments of their recent association.
That he may avoid this, a sensitive writer is often
put to his shifts, and extorts, if he be fortunate,
a triumph from the accident of his encumbrance.
By a slight stress laid on the difference of usage
the unshapeliness may be done away with, and a
new grace found where none was sought. Addison
and Landor accuse Milton, with reason, of too
great a fondness for the pun, yet surely there is
something to please the mind, as well as the ear,
in the description of the heavenly judgment,
That brought into this world a world of woe.
Where words are not fitted with a single hard

52 Style

definition, rigidly observed, all repetition is a kind
of delicate punning, bringing slight differences of
application into clear relief. The practice has its
dangers for the weak-minded lover of ornament,
yet even so it may be preferable to the flat
stupidity of one identical intention for a word or
phrase in twenty several contexts. For thej.aw_of
incessant change is not so much a counsel of
perfection to be held up before the apprentice,
a fundamental condition of all writing whatso-
ever ; if the change be not ordered by art it will
order itself in default of art. The same statement
can never be repeated even in the same form of
words, and it is not the old question that is pro-
pounded at the third time of asking. Repetition,
that is to say, is the strongest generator of em-
phasis known to language. Take the exquisite
repetitions in these few lines : —

Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear
Compels me to disturb your season due ;
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.

Here the tenderness of affection returns again

Style 53

to the loved name, and the grief of the mourner
repeats the word " dead.*" But this monotony of
sorrow is the least part of the effect, which lies
rather in the prominence given by either repetition
to the most moving circumstance of all — the
youthfulness of the dead poet. The attention of
the discursive intellect, impatient of reiteration, is
concentrated on the idea which these repeated and
exhausted words throw into relief. Rhetoric is
content to bprrow force from simpler methods ; a
good orator will often bring his hammer down, at
the end of successive periods, on the same phrase ;
and the mirthless refrain of a comic song, or the
catchword of a buffoon, will raise laughter at last
by its brazen importunity. Some modern writers,
admiring the easy power of the device, have
indulged themselves with too free a use of it ;
Matthew Arnold particularly, in his prose essays,
falls to crying his text like a hawker,

Beating it in upon our weary brains,
As tho' it were the burden of a song,

clattering upon the iron of the Philistine giant in
the effort to bring him to reason. These are the

54 Style

ostentatious violences of a missionary, who would
fain save his enemy alive, where a grimmer purpose
is glad to employ a more silent weapon and strike
but once. The callousness of a thick-witted
auditory lays the need for coarse method on the
gentlest soul resolved to stir them. But he whose
message is for minds attuned and tempered will be-
ware of needless reiteration, as of the noisiest way
of emphasis. Is the same word wanted again, he
will examine carefully whether the altered incidence
does not justify and require an altered term, which
the world is quick to call a synonym. The right
dictionary of synonyms would give the context of
each variant in the usage of the best authors. To
enumerate all the names applied by Milton to the
hero of Paradise Lost, without reference to the
passages in which they occur, would be a foolish
labour; with such reference, the task is made a
sovereign lesson in style. At Hell gates, where he
dallies in speech with his leman Sin to gain a
passage from the lower World, Satan is "the
subtle Fiend,11 in the garden of Paradise he is
"the Tempter11 and "the Enemy of Mankind,1'

Style 55

putting his fraud upon Eve he is " the wily Adder,"
leading her in full course to the tree he is " the
dire Snake," springing to his natural height before
the astonished gaze of the cherubs he is "the
grisly King." Every fresh designation elaborates
his character and history, emphasises the situation,
and saves a sentence. So it is with all variable
appellations of concrete objects ; and even in the
stricter and more conventional region of abstract
ideas the same law runs. Let a word be changed
or repeated, it brings in either case its contribution
of emphasis, and must be carefully chosen for the
part it is to play, lest it should upset the business
of the piece by irrelevant clownage in the midst of
high matter, saying more or less than is set down
for it in the author's purpose.

The chameleon quality of language may claim Metaphor
yet another illustration. Of origins we know section.-
nothing certainly, nor how words came by their Science.
meanings in the remote beginning, when speech,
like the barnacle-goose of the herbalist, was sus-
pended over an expectant world, ripening on a
tree. But this we know, that language in its

56 Style

mature state is fed and fattened on metaphor.
Figure is not a late device of the rhetorician, but
the earliest principle of change in language. The
whole process of speech is a long series of ex-
hilarating discoveries, whereby words, freed from
the swaddling bands of their nativity, are found
capable of new relations and a wider metaphorical
employ. Then, with the growth of exact know-
ledge, the straggling associations that attended
the word on its travels are straitened and con-
fined, its meaning is settled, adjusted, and
balanced, that it may bear its part in the
scrupulous deposition of truth. Many are the
words that have run this double course, liberated
from their first homely offices and transformed
by poetry, reclaimed in a more abstract sense, and
appropriated to a new set of facts by science.
Yet a third chance awaits them when the poet,
thirsty for novelty, passes by the old simple
founts of figure to draw metaphor from the latest
technical applications of specialised terms.
Everywhere the intuition of poetry, impatient
of the sturdy philosophic cripple that lags so

Style 57

far behind, is busy in advance to find likenesses
not susceptible of scientific demonstration, to leap
to comparisons that satisfy the heart while they
leave the colder intellect only half convinced.
When an elegant dilettante like Samuel Rogers
is confronted with the principle of gravitation
he gives voice to science in verse : —

That very law which moulds a tear,
And bids it trickle from its source,

That law preserves the earth a sphere,
And guides the planets in their course.

But a seer like Wordsworth will never be
content to write tunes for a text-book of physics,
he boldly confounds the arbitrary limits of matter
and morals in one splendid apostrophe to Duty : —

Flowers laugh before thee on their beds ;
And fragrance in thy footing treads ;
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong ;
And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and
strong.

Poets, it is said, anticipate science ; here in
these four lines is work for a thousand labora-
tories for a thousand years. But the truth has
been understated ; every writer and every speaker

\

58 Style

works ahead of science, expressing analogies and
contrasts, likenesses and differences, that will not
abide the apparatus of proof. The world of
perception and will, of passion and belief, is an
\ uncaptured virgin, airily deriding from afar the
calculated advances and practised modesty of the
old bawd Science ; turning again to shower a
benediction of unexpected caresses on the most
cavalier of her wooers, Poetry. This world, the
child of Sense and Faith, shy, wild, and provoca-
tive, for ever lures her lovers to the chase, and
the record of their hopes and conquests is con-
tained in the lovers language, made up wholly of
parable and figure of speech. There is nothing
under the sun nor beyond it that does not con-
cern man, and it is the unceasing effort of
humanity, whether by letters or by science, to
bring " the commerce of the mind and of things "
to terms of nearer correspondence. But Litera-
ture, ambitious to touch life on all its sides,
distrusts the way of abstraction, and can hardly
be brought to abandon the point of view whence
things are seen in their immediate relation to the

Style 59

individual soul. This kind of research is the
work of letters ; here are facts of human life to
be noted that are never like to be numerically
tabulated, changes and developments that defy
all metrical standards to be traced and described.
The greater men of .science have been cast in so
generous a mould that they have recognised the
partial nature of their task ; they have known
how to play with science as a pastime, and to win
and wear her decorations for a holiday favour.
They have not emaciated the fulness of their
faculties in the name of certainty, nor cramped
their humanity for the promise of a future good.
They have been the servants of Nature, not the
slaves of method. But the grammarian of the
laboratory is often the victim of his trade. He
staggers forth from his workshop, where pro-
longed concentration on a mechanical task,
directed to a provisional and doubtful goal, has
dimmed his faculties ; the glaring motley of the
world, bathed in sunlight, dazzles him ; the
questions, moral, political, and personal, that his
method has relegated to some future of larger

60 Style

knowledge, crowd upon him, clamorous for solu-
tion, not to be denied, insisting on a settlement
to-day. He is forced to make a choice, and may
either forsake the divinity he serves, falling back,
for the practical and aesthetic conduct of life, on
those common instincts of sensuality which oscil-
late between the conventicle and the tavern as the
poles of duty and pleasure, or, more pathetically
still, he may attempt to bring the code of the
observatory to bear immediately on the vagaries
of the untameable world, and suffer the pedant's
disaster. A martyr to the good that is to be, he
has voluntarily maimed himself " for the kingdom
of Heaven's sake " — if, perchance, the kingdom of
Heaven might come by observation. The en-
thusiasm of his self-denial shows itself in his un-
availing struggle to chain language also to the
bare rock of ascertained fact. Metaphor, the
poet's right-hand weapon, he despises ; all that is
tentative, individual, struck off at the urging of a
mood, he disclaims and suspects. Yet the very
rewards that science promises have their parallel
in the domain of letters. The discovery of like-

Style 61

ness in the midst of difference, and of difference
in the midst of likeness, is the keenest pleasure of
the intellect ; and literary expression, as has been
said, is one long series of such discoveries, each
with its thrill of incommunicable happiness, all un-
precedented, and perhaps unverifiable by later
experiment. The finest instrument of these
discoveries is metaphor, the spectroscope of
letters.

Enough has been said of change ; it remains to The Doctrine
speak of one more of those illusions of fixity propre.
wherein writers seek exemption from the general
lot. Language, it has been shown, is to be fitted \^

to thought ; and, further, there are no synonyms.
What more natural conclusion could be drawn by
the enthusiasm of the artist than that there is
some kind of preordained harmony between
words and things, whereby expression and thought
tally exactly, like the halves of a puzzle? This
illusion, called in France the doctrine of the mot
propre? is a will o' the wisp which has kept many
an artist dancing on its trail. That there is one,
and only one way of expressing one thing has

62 Style

been the belief of other writers besides Gustave
Flaubert, inspiriting them to a desperate and
fruitful industry. It is an amiable fancy, like the
dream of Michael Angelo, who loved to imagine
that the statue existed already in the block of
marble, and had only to be stripped of its super-
fluous wrappings, or like the indolent fallacy of
those economic soothsayers to whom Malthus
brought rough awakening, that population and
the means of subsistence move side by side in
harmonious progress. But hunger does not imply
food, and there may hover in the restless heads of
poets, as themselves testify —

One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest.

\ Matter and form are not so separable as the
popular philosophy would have them ; indeed, the
very antithesis between them is a cardinal instance
of how language reacts on thought, modifying
and fixing a cloudy truth. The idea pursues
form not only that it may be known to others,
but that it may know itself, and the body in which
it becomes incarnate is not to be distinguished from

Style 63

the informing soul. It is recorded of a famous
Latin historian how he declared that he would
have made Pompey win the battle of Pharsalia
had the effective turn of the sentence required it.
He may stand for the true type of the literary
artist. The business of letters, howsoever simple
it may seem to those who think truth-telling a
gift of nature, is in reality two-fold, to find words
for a meaning, and to find a meaning for words.
Now it is the words that refuse to yield, and now
the meaning, so that he who attempts to wed
them is at the same time altering his words to
suit his meaning, .and modifying and shaping his
meaning to satisfy the requirements of his words.
The humblest processes of thought have had their f"
first education from language long before they
took shape in literature. So subtle is the con-
nexion between the two that it is equally possible
to call language the form given to the matter
of thought, or, inverting the application of the
figure, to speak of thought as the formal principle
that shapes the raw material of language. It is
not until the two become one that they can be

64 Style

known for two. The idea to be expressed is a
kind of mutual recognition between thought and
language, which here meet and claim each other
for the first time, just as in the first glance
exchanged by lovers, the unborn child opens its
eyes on the world, and pleads for life. But
thought, although it may indulge itself with the
fancy of a predestined affiance, is not confined to
one mate, but roves free and is the father of
many children. A belief in the inevitable word
is the last refuge of that stubborn mechanical
theory of the universe which has been slowly
driven from science, politics, and history. Amidst
so much that is undulating, it has pleased writers
to imagine that truth persists and is provided by
heavenly munificence with an imperishable garb
of language. But this also is vanity, there is one
end appointed alike to all, fact goes the way of
fiction, and what is known is no more perdurable
than what is made. Not words nor works, but
only that which is formless endures, the vitality
that is another name for change, the breath
that fills and shatters the bubbles of good and

Style 65

evil, of beauty and deformity, of truth and un-
truth.

No art is easy, least of all the art of letters. The

ment.

Apply the musical analogy once more to the
instrument whereon literature performs its volun-
taries. With a living keyboard of notes which —
are all incessantly changing in value, so that
what rang true under Dr. Johnson's hand may
sound flat or sharp now, with a range of a myriad
strings, some falling mute and others being added
from day to day, with numberless permutations
and combinations, each of which alters the tone
and pitch of the units that compose it, with fluid
ideas that never have an outlined existence until
they have found their phrases and the improvisa-
tion is complete, is it to be wondered at that the
art of style is eternally elusive, and that the
attempt to reduce it to rule is the forlorn hope
of academic infatuation ?

These difficulties and complexities of the The
instrument are, nevertheless, the least part of the
ordeal that is to be undergone by the writer. The

66 Style

same musical note or phrase affects different ears
* in_much the same way ; not so the word or group
of words. The pure idea, let us say, is translated
into language by the literary composer ; who is to
j/ be responsible for the retranslation of the lan-
guage into idea? Here begins the story of the
troubles and weaknesses that are imposed upon
literature by the necessity it lies under of address-
ing itself to an audience, by its liability to
anticipate the corruptions that mar the under-
standing of the spoken or written word. A word
is the operative symbol of a relation between two
minds, and is chosen by the one not without
regard to the quality of the effect actually pro-
duced upon the other. Men must be spoken to in
their accustomed tongue, and persuaded that the
unknown God proclaimed by the poet is one whom
aforetime they ignorantly worshipped. The
relation of great authors to the public may be
compared to the war of the sexes, a quiet watchful
antagonism between two parties mutually indis-
pensable to each other, at one time veiling itself
in endearments, at another breaking out into open

Style 67

defiance. He who has a message to deliver must
wrestle with his fellows before he shall be permitted
to ply them with uncomfortable or unfamiliar
truths. The public, like the delicate Greek Nar-
cissus, is sleepily enamoured of itself; and the name
of its only other perfect lover is Echo. Yet even
great authors must lay their account with the
public, and it is instructive to observe how different
are the attitudes they have adopted, how uniform
the disappointment they have felt. Some, like
Browning and Mr. Meredith in our own day,
trouble themselves little about the reception given
to their work, but are content to say on, until the
few who care to listen have expounded them to the
many, and they are applauded, in the end, by a
generation whom they have trained to appreciate
them. Yet this noble and persevering indifference
is none of their choice, and long years of absolution
from criticism must needs be paid for in faults of
style. "Writing for the stage," Mr. Meredith
himself has remarked, " would be a corrective of a
too-incrusted scholarly style into which some great
ones fall at times." Denied such a corrective, the

68 Style

great one is apt to sit alone and tease his medita-
tions into strange shapes, fortifying himself against
obscurity and neglect with the reflection that most
of the words he uses are to be found, after all, in
the dictionary. It is not, however, from the
secluded scholar that the sharpest cry of pain is
wrung by the indignities of his position, but rather
from genius in the act of earning a full meed of
popular applause. Both Shakespeare and Ben
Jonson wrote for the stage, both were blown by
the favouring breath of their plebeian patrons into
reputation and a competence. Each of them
passed through the thick of the fight, and well
knew that ugly corner where the artist is exposed
to cross fires, his own idea of masterly work on
, the one hand and the necessity for pleasing the
rabble on the other. When any man is awake to
the fact that the public is a vile patron, when he
is conscious also that his bread and his fame are
in their gift — it is a stern passage for his soul, a
touchstone for the strength and gentleness of his
spirit. Jonson, whose splendid scorn took to itself
lyric wings in the two great Odes to Himself, sang

Style 69

high and aloof for a while, then the frenzy
caught him, and he flung away his lyre to gird
himself for deeds of mischief among nameless and
noteless antagonists. Even Chapman, who, in The
Tears of Peace, compares " men's refuse ears " to
those gates in ancient cities which were opened only
when the bodies of executed malefactors were to
be cast away, who elsewhere gives utterance, in
round terms, to his belief that

No truth of excellence was ever seen

But bore the venom of the vulgar's spleen,

— even the violences of this great and haughty
spirit must pale beside the more desperate
violences of the dramatist who commended his
play to the public in the famous line,

By God, 'tis good, and if you like't, you may.

This stormy passion of arrogant independence
disturbs the serenity of atmosphere necessary for
creative art. A greater than Jonson donned the
suppliant's robes, like Coriolanus, and with the
inscrutable honeyed smile about his lips begged
for the "most sweet voices'" of the journeymen

70 Style

and gallants who thronged the Globe Theatre.
Only once does the wail of anguish escape him —

Alas ! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,

And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most
dear.

And again—-
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,

And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand,
Pity me then, and wish I were renewed.

Modern vulgarity, speaking through the mouths
of Shakesperian commentators, is wont to interpret
these lines as a protest against the contempt
wherewith Elizabethan society regarded the pro-
fessions of playwright and actor. We are asked
to conceive that Shakespeare humbly desires the
pity of his bosom friend because he is not put on
the same level of social estimation with a brocaded
gull or a prosperous stupid goldsmith of the
Cheap. No, it is a cry, from the depth of his
nature, for forgiveness because he has sacrificed a
little on the altar of popularity. Jonson would

Style 71

have boasted that he never made this sacrifice.
But he lost the calm of his temper and the clear-
ness of his singing voice, he degraded his
magnanimity by allowing it to engage in street-
brawls, and he endangered the sanctuary of the
inviolable soul.

At least these great artists of the sixteenth The Relation

of the Author

and nineteenth centuries are agreed upon one to his

Audience.

thing, that the public, even in its most gracious
mood, makes an ill task-master for the man of
letters. It is worth the pains to ask why, and to
attempt to show how much of an author's literary
quality is involved in his attitude towards his
audience. Such an inquiry will take us, it is true,
into bad company, and exhibit the vicious, the
fatuous, and the frivolous posturing to an ad-
miring crowd. But style is a property of all

^
written and printed matter, so that to track it to

its causes and origins is a task wherein literary
criticism may profit by the humbler aid of anthro-
pological research.

Least of all authors is the poet subject to the The Poet
tyranny of his audience. " Poetry and eloquence,"

72 Style

says John Stuart Mill, "are both alike the ex-
pression or utterance of feeling. But if we may
be excused the antithesis, we should say that
eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard. Eloquence y
supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry
appears to us to lie in the poet's utter uncon-
sciousness of a listener." Poetry, according to this
discerning criticism, is an inspired soliloquy; the
thoughts rise unforced and unchecked, taking
musical form in obedience only to the law of their
being, giving pleasure to an audience only as the
mountain spring may chance to assuage the thirst
of a passing traveller. In lyric poetry, language,
from being a utensil, or a medium of traffic and
barter, passes back to its place among natural
sounds; its affinity is with the wind among the
trees and the stream among the rocks ; it is the
cry of the heart, as simple as the breath we draw,
and as little ordered with a view to applause.
Yet speech grew up in society, and even in the
most ecstatic of its uses may flag for lack of
understanding and response. It were rash to say
that the poets need no audience ; the loneliest have

Style 73

promised themselves a tardy recognition, and some
among the greatest came to their maturity in the
warm atmosphere of a congenial society. Indeed
the ratification set upon merit by a living audience,
fit though few, is necessary for the development
of the most humane and sympathetic genius ; and
the memorable ages of literature, in Greece or
Rome, in France or England, have been the ages
of a literary society. The nursery of our greatest
dramatists must be looked for, not, it is true, in
the transfigured bear-gardens of the Bankside, but
in those enchanted taverns, islanded and bastioned
by the protective decree —

Idiota, insulsus, tristis, turpis, abesto.

The poet seems to be soliloquising because he
is addressing himself, with the most entire con-
fidence, to a small company of his friends, who
may even, in unhappy seasons, prove to be the
creatures of his imagination. Real or imaginary,
they are taken by him for his equals ; he expects
from them a quick intelligence and a perfect
sympathy, which may enable him to despise all

74 Style

concealment. He never preaches to them, nor
scolds, nor enforces the obvious. Content that
what he has spoken he has spoken, he places a
magnificent trust on a single expression. He
neither explains, nor falters, nor repents; he
introduces his work with no preface, and cumbers
it with no notes. He will not lower nor raise his
voice for the sake of the profane and idle who
may chance to stumble across his entertainment.
His living auditors, unsolicited for the tribute of
worship or an alms, find themselves conceived of
in the likeness of what he would have them to be,
raised to a companion pinnacle of friendship, and
constituted peers and judges, if they will, of his
achievement. Sometimes they come late.

This blend of dignity and intimacy, of candour
and self-respect, is unintelligible to the vulgar,
who understand by intimacy mutual concession to
a base ideal, and who are so accustomed to deal
with masks, that when they see a face they are
shocked as by some grotesque. Now a poet, like
Montaigne's naked philosopher, is all face; and
the bewilderment of his masked and muffled critics

Style 75

is the greater. Wherever he attracts general
attention he cannot but be misunderstood. The
generality of modern men and women who pretend
to literature are not hypocrites, or they might go
near to divine him, — for hypocrisy, though rooted
in cowardice, demands for its flourishing a clear
intellectual atmosphere, a definite aim, and a
certain detachment of the directing mind. But
they are habituated to trim themselves by the
cloudy mirror of opinion, and will mince and
temporise, as if for an invisible audience, even in
their bedrooms. Their masks have, for the most
part, grown to their faces, so that, except in some
rare animal paroxysm of emotion, it is hardly
themselves that they express. The apparition of
a poet disquiets them, for he clothes himself with
the elements, and apologises to no idols. His
candour frightens them : they avert their eyes
from it ; or they treat it as a licensed whim ; or,
with a sudden gleam of insight, and apprehension
of what this means for them and theirs, they
scream aloud for fear. A modern instance may
be found in the angry protestations launched

76 Style

against Rossett^s Sonnets, at the time of their
first appearance, by a writer who has since matched
himself very exactly with an audience of his own
kind. A stranger freak of burgess criticism is
every-day fare in the odd world peopled by the
biographers of Robert Burns. The nature of
Burns, one would think, was simplicity itself; it
could hardly puzzle a ploughman, and two sailors
out of three would call him brother. But he lit
up the whole of that nature by his marvellous
genius for expression, and grave personages have
been occupied ever since in discussing the dualism
of his character, and professing to find some dark
mystery in the existence of this, that, or the other
trait — a love of pleasure, a hatred of shams, a
deep sense of religion. It is common human
nature, after all, that is the mystery, but they
seem never to have met with it, and treat it as if
it were the poet's eccentricity. They are all agog
to worship him, and when they have made an
image of him in their own likeness, and given it a
tin-pot head that exactly hits their taste, they
break into noisy lamentation over the discovery

Style 77

that the original was human, and had feet of clay.
They deem " Mary in Heaven " so admirable that
they could find it in their hearts to regret that
she was ever on earth. This sort of admirers
constantly refuses to bear a part in any human
relationship ; they ask to be fawned on, or trodden
on, by the poet while he is in life; when he is
dead they make of him a candidate for godship,
and heckle him. It is a misfortune not wholly
without its compensations that most great poets
are dead before they are popular.

If great and original literary artists — here Public

Caterers

grouped together under the title of poets — will
not enter into transactions with their audience,
there is no lack of authors who will. These are
not necessarily charlatans ; they may have by
nature a ready sympathy with the grossness of the
public taste, and thus take pleasure in studying to
gratify it. But man loses not a little of himself
in crowds, and some degradation there must be
where the one adapts himself to the many. The
British public is not seen at its best when it is
enjoying a holiday in a foreign country, nor when

78 Style

it is making excursions into the realm of imagina-
tive literature: those who cater for it in these
matters must either study its tastes or share them.
Many readers bring the worst of themselves to a
novel ; they want lazy relaxation, or support for
their nonsense, or escape from their creditors,
or a free field for emotions that they dare not
indulge in life. The reward of an author who
meets them half-way in these respects, who neither
puzzles nor distresses them, who asks nothing from
them, but compliments them on their great posses-
sions and sends them away rejoicing, is a full
measure of acceptance, and editions unto seventy
times seven.
The The evils caused by the influence of the audience

Cautelous

Man. on the writer are many. First of all comes a fault far
enough removed from the characteristic vices of the
charlatan — to wit, sheer timidity and weakness.
There is a kind of stage-fright that seizes on a man
when he takes pen in hand to address an unknown
body of hearers, no less than when he stands up to
deliver himself to a sea of expectant faces. This
is the true panic fear, that walks at mid-day, and

Style 79

unmans those whom it visits. Hence come reserva-
tions, qualifications, verbosity, and the see-saw of
a wavering courage, which apes progress and
purpose, as soldiers mark time with their feet.
The writing produced under these auspices is of
no greater moment than the incoherent loquacity
of a nervous patient. All self-expression is a
challenge thrown down to the world, to be taken
up by whoso will ; and the spirit of timidity, when
it touches a man, suborns him with the reminder
that he holds his life and goods by the suffer-
ance of his fellows. Thereupon he begins to doubt
whether it is worth while to court a verdict of so
grave possibilities, or to risk offending a judge
whose customary geniality is merely the outcome
of a fixed habit of inattention. In doubt whether
to speak or keep silence, he takes a middle course,
and while purporting to speak for himself, is
careful to lay stress only on the points whereon all
are agreed, to enlarge eloquently on the doubtful-
ness of things, and to give to words the very least
meaning that they will carry. Such a procedure,
which glides over essentials, and handles truisms

80 Style

or trivialities with a fervour of conviction, has its
functions in practice. It will win for a politician
the coveted and deserved repute of a " safe " man
— safe, even though the cause perish. Pleaders
and advocates are sometimes driven into it, because
to use vigorous, clean, crisp English in addressing
an ordinary jury or committee is like flourishing a
sword in a drawing-room : it will lose the case.
Where the weakest are to be convinced speech
must stoop : a full consideration of the velleities
and uncertainties, a little bombast to elevate the
feelings without committing the judgment, some
vague effusion of sentiment, an inapposite bland-
ness, a meaningless rodomontade — these are the
by-ways to be travelled by the style that is a
willing slave to its audience. The like is true of
those documents — petitions, resolutions, congratu-
latory addresses, and so forth — that are written to
be signed by a multitude of names. Public occa-
sions of this kind, where all and sundry are to be
satisfied, have given rise to a new parliamentary
dialect, which has nothing of the freshness of
individual emotion, is powerless to deal with

Style 81

realities, and lacks all resonance, vitality, and
nerve. There is no cure for this, where the
feelings and opinions of a crowd are to be ex-
pressed. But where indecision is the ruling passion
of the individual, he may cease to write. Popu-
larity was never yet the prize of those whose only
care is to avoid offence.

For hardier aspirants, the two main entrances Sentimental-
ism and

to popular favour are by the twin gates of laughter ' Jocularity.
and tears. Pathos knits the soul and braces the
nerves, humour purges the eyesight and vivifies
the sympathies ; the counterfeits of these qualities
work the opposite effects. It is comparatively
easy to appeal to passive emotions, to play upon
the melting mood of a diffuse sensibility, or to
encourage the narrow mind to dispense a patron's
laughter from the vantage-ground of its own small
preconceptions. Our annual crop of sentiment-
alists and mirth-makers supplies the reading public
with food. Tragedy, which brings the naked soul
face to face with the austere terrors of Fate,
Comedy, which turns the light inward and dissi-
pates the mists of self-affection and self-esteem,

82 Style

have long since given way on the public stage to
the flattery of Melodrama, under many names.
In the books he reads and in the plays he sees the
average man recognises himself in the hero, and
vociferates his approbation.

The sensibility that came into vogue during
the eighteenth century was of a finer grain than
its modern counterpart. It studied delicacy, and
sought a cultivated enjoyment in evanescent shades
of feeling, and the fantasies of unsubstantial grief.
The real Princess of Hans Andersen's story, who
passed a miserable night because there was a small
bean concealed beneath the twenty eider-down
beds on which she slept, might stand for a type of
the aristocracy of feeling that took a pride in
these ridiculous susceptibilities. The modern senti-
mentalist works in a coarser material. That
ancient, subtle, and treacherous affinity among the
emotions, whereby religious exaltation has before
now been made the ally of the unpurified passions,
is parodied by him in a simpler and more useful
device. By alleging a moral purpose he is enabled
to gratify the prurience of his public and to raise

Style 83

them in their own muddy conceit at one and the
same time. The plea serves well with those artless
readers who have been accustomed to consider the
moral of a story as something separable from
imagination, expression, and style — a quality, it
may be, inherent in the plot, or a kind of appendix,
exercising a retrospective power of jurisdiction and
absolution over the extravagances of the piece to
which it is affixed. Let virtue be rewarded, and
they are content though it should never be vitally
imagined or portrayed. If their eyes were opened
they might cry with Brutus — " O miserable Virtue !
Thou art but a phrase, and I have followed thee
as though thou wert a reality."

It is in quite another kind, however, that the The Tripe
modern purveyor of sentiment exercises his most
characteristic talent. There are certain real and
deeply-rooted feelings, common to humanity, con-
cerning which, in their normal operation, a grave
reticence is natural. They are universal in their
appeal, men would be ashamed not to feel them,
and it is no small part of the business of life to
keep them under strict control. Here is the senti-

84 Style

mental huckster's most valued opportunity. He
tears these primary instincts from the wholesome
privacy that shelters them in life, and cries them
up from his booth in the market-place. The
elemental forces of human life, which beget shy-
ness in children, and touch the spirits of the wise
to solemn acquiescence, awaken him to noisier
declamation. He patronises the stern laws of love
and pity, hawking them like indulgences, cheapen-
ing and commending them like the medicines of a
mountebank. The censure of his critics he im-
pudently meets by pointing to his wares : are not
some of the most sacred properties of humanity
— sympathy with suffering, family affection, filial
devotion, and the rest — displayed upon his stall ?
Not thus shall he evade the charges brought
against him. It is the sensual side of the tender
emotions that he exploits for the comfort of the
million. All the intricacies which life offers to
the will and the intellect he lards and obliterates
by the timely effusion of tearful sentiment. His
humanitarianism is a more popular, as it is an
easier, ideal than humanity — it asks no expense

Style 85

of thought. There is a scanty public in England
for tragedy or for comedy : the characters and
situations handled by the sentimentalist might
perchance furnish comedy with a theme; but he
stilts them for a tragic performance, and they
tumble into watery bathos, where a numerous
public awaits them.

A similar degradation of the intellectual ele-
ments that are present in all good literature is

practised by those whose single aim is to provoke? v

\ /
laughter. In much of our so-called comic writing

a superabundance of boisterous animal spirits,
restrained from more practical expression by the
ordinances of civil society, finds outlet and relief. \
The grimaces and caperings of buffoonery, the v
gymnastics of the punster and the parodist, the
revels of pure nonsense may be, at their best, a
refreshment and delight, but they are not comedy,
and have proved in effect not a little hostile to
the existence of comedy. The prevalence of jokers,
moreover, spoils the game of humour ; the sputter
and sparkle of their made jokes interferes with
that luminous contemplation of the incongruities

86 Style

of life and the universe which is humour's essence.
All that is ludicrous depends on some dispropor-
tion : Comedy judges the actual world by contrast-
ing it with an ideal of sound sense, Humour
reveals it in its true dimensions by turning on it
the light of imagination and poetry. The per-
ception of these incongruities, which are eternal,
demands some expense of intellect; a cheaper
amusement may be enjoyed by him who is content
to take his stand on his own habits and prejudices
and to laugh at all that does not square with
them. This was the method of the age which, in
the abysmal profound of waggery, engendered
that portentous birth, the comic paper. Foreigners,
it is said, do not laugh at the wit of these journals,
and no wonder, for only a minute study of the
customs and preoccupations of certain sections of
English society could enable them to understand
the point of view. From time to time one or
another of the writers who are called upon for
their weekly tale of jokes seems struggling upward
to the free domain of Comedy ; but in vain, his
public holds him down, and Compels him to laugh

Style 87

in chains. Some day, perchance, a literary his-
torian, filled with the spirit of Cervantes or of
Moliere, will give account of the Victorian era,
and, not disdaining small things, will draw a
picture of the society which inspired and controlled
so resolute a jocularity. Then, at last, will the
spirit of Comedy recognise that these were indeed
what they claimed to be — comic papers.

"The style is the man;" but the social and ^Social and

Rhetorical

rhetorical influences adulterate and debase it, until Corruptions.
not one man in a thousand achieves his birth-
right, or claims his second self. The fire of the
soul burns all too feebly, and warms itself by the
reflected heat from the society around it. We
give back words of tepid greeting, without im-
provement. We talk to our fellows in the phrases
we learn from them, which come to mean less and
less as they grow worn with use. Then we
exaggerate and distort, heaping epithet upon epi-
thet in the endeavour to get a little warmth out
of the smouldering pile. The quiet cynicism of
our everyday demeanour is open and shameless,
we callously anticipate objections founded on the

88 Style

well-known vacuity of our seeming emotions, and
assure our friends that we are " truly " grieved or
"sincerely" rejoiced at their hap — as if joy or
grief that really exists were some rare and precious
brand of joy or grief. In its trivial conversational
uses so simple and pure a thing as joy becomes a
sandwich-man — humanity degraded to an adver-
tisement. The poor dejected word shuffles along
through the mud in the service of the sleek trader
who employs it, and not until it meets with a
poet is it rehabilitated and restored to dignity.

This is no indictment of society, which came
into being before literature, and, in all the
distraction of its multifarious concerns, can hardly
keep a school for Style. It is rather a demonstra-
tion of the necessity, amid the wealthy disorder
of modern civilisation, for poetic diction. One of
the hardest of a poet's tasks is the search for his
vocabulary. Perhaps in some idyllic pasture-
land of Utopia there may have flourished a state
where division of labour was unknown, where
community of ideas, as well as of property, was
absolute, and where the language of every day ran

Style 89

clear into poetry without the need of a refining
process. They say that Caedmon was a cow-
keeper: but the shepherds of Theocritus and
Virgil are figments of a courtly brain, and
Wordsworth himself, in his boldest flights of
theory, was forced to allow of selection. Even
by selection from among the chaos of implements
that are in daily use around him, a poet can
barely equip himself with a choice of words
sufficient for his needs ; he must have recourse to
his predecessors ; and so it comes about that the
poetry of the modern world is a store-house of
obsolete diction. The most surprising character-
istic of the right poetic diction, whether it draw
its vocabulary from near at hand, or avail itself of
the far-fetched inheritance preserved by the poets,
is its matchless sincerity. Something of ex-
travagance there may be in those brilliant clusters
of romantic words that are everywhere found in
the work of Shakespeare, or Spenser, or Keats,
but they are the natural leafage and fruitage of
a luxuriant imagination, which, lacking these,
could not attain to its full height. Only by the

90 Style

energy of the arts can a voice be given to the
subtleties and raptures of emotional experience;
ordinary social intercourse affords neither oppor-
tunity nor means for this fervour of self-revelation.
And if the highest reach of poetry is often to be
found in the use of common colloquialisms,
charged with the intensity of restrained passion,
this is not due to a greater sincerity of expression,
but to the strength derived from dramatic situa-
tion. Where speech spends itself on its subject,
drama stands idle ; but where the dramatic stress
is at its greatest, three or four words may en-
shrine all the passion of the moment. Romeo's
apostrophe from under the balcony —

O, speak again, bright Angel ! for thou art
As glorious to this night, being o'er my head,
As is a winged messenger of heaven
Unto the white-upturned wond'ring eyes
Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him,
When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds,
And sails upon the bosom of the air —

though it breathe the soul of romance, must yield,
for sheer effect, to his later soliloquy, spoken
when the news of Juliet's death is brought to him,

Style 91

Well, Juliet, I will lie with thee to-night.

And even the constellated glories of Paradise
Lost are less moving than the plain words wherein
Samson forecasts his approaching end —

So much I feel my genial spirits droop,
My hopes all flat ; Nature within me seems
In all her functions weary of herself ;
My race of glory run and race of shame,
And I shall shortly be with them that rest.

Here are simple words raised to a higher power
and animated with a purer intention than they
carry in ordinary life. It is this unfailing note of
sincerity, eloquent or laconic, that has made
poetry the teacher of prose. Phrases which, to
all seeming, might have been hit on by the first
comer, are often cut away from their poetical
context and robbed of their musical value that
they may be transferred to the service of prose.
They bring with them, down to the valley, a
wafted sense of some region of higher thought
and purer feeling. They bear, perhaps, no marks
of curious diction to know them by. Whence
comes the irresistible pathos of the lines —

92 Style

I cannot but remember such things were
That were most precious to me ?

The thought, the diction, the syntax, might
all occur in prose. Yet when once the stamp of
poetry has been put upon a cry that is as old as
humanity, prose desists from rivalry, and is con-
tent to quote. Some of the greatest prose-
writers have not disdained the help of these
borrowed graces for the crown of their fabric.
In this way De Quincey widens the imaginative
range of his prose, and sets back the limits
assigned to prose diction. So too, Charles Lamb,
interweaving the stuff of experience with phrases
quoted or altered from the poets, illuminates both
life and poetry, letting his sympathetic humour
play now on the warp of the texture, and now
on the woof. The style of Burke furnishes a
still better example, for the spontaneous evolution
of his prose might be thought to forbid the
inclusion of borrowed fragments. Yet whenever
he is deeply stirred, memories of Virgil, Milton,
or the English Bible rise to his aid, almost as if
strong emotion could express itself in no other

Style 93

language. Even the poor invectives of political
controversy gain a measure of dignity from the
skilful application of some famous line ; the touch
of the poet's sincerity rests on them for a moment,
and seems to lend them an alien splendour. It is
like the blessing of a priest, invoked by the pious,
or by the worldly, for the good success of what-
ever business they have in hand. Poetry has no
temporal ends to serve, no livelihood to earn, and
is under no temptation to cog and lie : wherefore
prose pays respect to that loftier calling, and that
more unblemished sincerity.

. In^iijcerity^on the other hand, is the commonest J insincerity.

vice of style. It is not to be avoided, except in
the rarest cases, by those to whom the written use
of language is unfamiliar ; so that a shepherd who
talks pithy, terse sense will be unable to express
himself in a letter without having recourse to the
Ready Letter-writer — " This comes hoping to find
you well, as it also leaves me at present " — and a
soldier, without the excuse of ignorance, will
describe a successful advance as having been made
against "a thick hail of bullets." It permeates

94 Style

ordinary journalism, and all writing produced
under commercial pressure. It taints the work of
the young artist, caught by the romantic fever,
who glories in the wealth of vocabulary discovered
to him by the poets, and seeks often in vain for a
thought stalwart enough to wear that glistering
armour. Hence it is that the masters of style
have always had to preach restraint, self-denial,
austerity. His style is a man's own; yet how
hard it is to come by ! It is a man^s bride, to be
won by labours and agonies that bespeak a heroic
lover. If he prove unable to endure the trial,
there are cheaper beauties, nearer home, easy to
be conquered, and faithless to their conqueror.
Taking up with them, he may attain a brief
satisfaction, but he will never redeem his quest.
Austerity. As a body of practical rules, the negative
precepts of asceticism bring with them a certain
chill. The page is dull ; it is so easy to lighten it
with some flash of witty irrelevance : the Argu-
ment is long and tedious, why not relieve it by
wandering into some of those green enclosures that
open alluring doors upon the wayside ? To roam

Style 95

at will, spring-heeled, high-hearted, and catching at
all good fortunes, is the ambition of the youth, ere
yet he has subdued himself to a destination. The
principle of self-denial seems at first sight a
treason done to genius, which was always privileged
to be wilful. In this view literature is a fortuitous
series of happy thoughts and heaven-sent findings.
But the end of that plan is beggary. Sprightly
talk about the first object that meets the eye and
the indulgence of vagabond habits soon degenerate
to a professional garrulity, a forced face of dismal
cheer, and a settled dislike of strenuous exercise.
The economies and abstinences of discipline
promise a kinder fate than this. They test and
strengthen purpose, without which no great work
comes into being. They save the expenditure of
energy on those pastimes and diversions which
lead no nearer to the goal. To reject the images
and arguments that proffer a casual assistance yet
are not to be brought under the perfect control of
the main theme is difficult; how should it be
otherwise, for if they were not already dear to the
writer they would not have volunteered their aid.

96 Style

It is the more difficult, in that to refuse the
unfit is no warrant of better help to come. But
to accept them is to fall back for good upon a
makeshift, and to hazard the enterprise in a
hubbub of disorderly claims. No train of thought
is strengthened by the addition of those arguments
that, like camp-followers, swell the number and
the noise, without bearing a part in the organisa-
tion. The danger that comes in with the
employment of figures of speech, similes, and
comparisons is greater still. The clearest of them
may be attended by some element of grotesque or
paltry association, so that while they illumine the
subject they cannot truly be said to illustrate it.
The noblest, including those time-honoured meta-
phors that draw their patent of nobility from war,
love, religion, or the chase, in proportion as they
are strong and of a vivid presence, are also
domineering — apt to assume command of the
theme long after their proper work is done. So
great is the headstrong power of the finest meta-
phors, that an author may be incommoded by one
that does his business for him handsomely, as a

Style 97

king may suffer the oppression of a powerful ally.
When a lyric begins with the splendid lines,

Love still has something- of the sea
From whence his mother rose,

the further development of that song is already
fixed and its knell rung — to the last line there is
no escaping from the dazzling influences that
presided over the first. Yet to carry out such a
figure in detail, as Sir Charles Sedley set himself
to do, tarnishes the sudden glory of the opening.
The lady whom Burns called Clarinda put herself
in a like quandary by beginning a song with this

stanza —

Talk not of Love, it gives me pain,

For Love has been my foe ;
He bound me in an iron chain,
And plunged me deep in woe.

The last two lines deserve praise — even the
praise they obtained from a great lyric poet. But
how is the song to be continued ? Genius might
answer the question ; to Clarinda there came only
the notion of a valuable contrast to be established
between love and friendship, and a tribute to be

paid to the kindly offices of the latter. The
H

98 Style

verses wherein she gave effect to this idea make a
poor sequel ; friendship, when it is personified and
set beside the tyrant god, wears very much the
air of a benevolent county magistrate, whose chief
duty is to keep the peace.
The Figura- Figures of this sort are in no sense removable

five Style.

decorations, they are at one with the substance of
the thought to be expressed, and are entitled to
the large control they claim. Imagination, work-
ing at white heat, can fairly subdue the matter of
the poem to them, or fuse them with others of the
like temper, striking unity out of the composite
v mass. One thing only is forbidden, to treat these
substantial and living metaphors as if they were
elegant curiosities, ornamental excrescences, to be
passed over abruptly on the way to more exacting
topics. The mystics, and the mystical poets,
knew better than to countenance this frivolity.
Recognising that there is a profound and intimate
correspondence between all physical manifestations
and the life of the soul, they flung the reins on
the neck of metaphor in the hope that it might
carry them over that mysterious frontier. Their

Style 99

failures and misadventures, familiarly despised as
"conceits,*" left them floundering in absurdity.
Yet not since the time of Donne and Crashaw has
the full power and significance of figurative lan-
guage been realised in English poetry. These
poets, like some of their late descendants, were
tortured by a sense of hidden meaning, and were
often content with analogies that admit of no
rigorous explanation. They were convinced that
all intellectual truth is a parable, though its inner
meaning be dark or dubious. The philosophy
of friendship deals with those mathematical and
physical conceptions, of distance, likeness, and
attraction — what if the law of bodies govern souls
also, and the geometer's compasses measure more
than it has entered into his heart to conceive ? Is
the moon a name only for a certain tonnage of
dead matter, and is the law of passion parochial
while the law of gravitation is universal?
Mysticism will observe no such partial boundaries.

O more than Moon !

Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere,
Weep me not dead in thine arms, but forbear
To teach the sea what it may do too soon.

100 Style

The secret of these sublime intuitions, un-
divined by many of the greatest poets, has been
left to the keeping of transcendental religion and
the Catholic Church.

Decoration. Figure and ornament, therefore, are not inter-
changeable terms ; the loftiest figurative style
v most conforms to the precepts of gravity and
chastity. None the less there is a decorative use
of figure, whereby a theme is enriched with
imaginations and memories that are foreign to
the main purpose. Under this head may be
classed most of those allusions to the world's
literature, especially to classical and Scriptural
lore, which have played so considerable, yet on
the whole so idle, a part in modern poetry. It is
here that an inordinate love of decoration finds
its opportunity and its snare. To keep the
most elaborate comparison in harmony with
its occasion, so that when it is completed
it shall fall back easily into the emotional
key of the narrative, has been the study of
the great epic poets. Milton's description of
the rebel legions adrift on the flaming sea

Style 101

is a fine instance of the difficulty felt and

conquered :

Angel forms, who lay entranced
Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades
High over-arched embower ; or scattered sedge
Afloat, when with fierce winds Orion armed
Hath vexed the Red-Sea coast, whose waves o'erthrew
Busiris and his Memphian chivalry,
While with perfidious hatred they pursued
The sojouruers of Goshen, who beheld
From the safe shore their floating carcases
And broken chariot-wheels. So thick bestrown,
Abject and lost, lay these, covering the flood,
Under amazement of their hideous change.

The comparison seems to wander away at
random, obedient to the slightest touch of asso-
ciation. Yet in the end it is brought back,
its majesty heightened, and a closer element of
likeness introduced by the skilful turn that
substitutes the image of the shattered Egyptian
army for the former images of dead leaves and
sea- weed. The incidental pictures, of the roof of
shades, of the watchers from the shore, and the very
name "Red Sea," fortuitous as they may seem,
all lend help to the imagination in bodying forth

102 Style

the scene described. An earlier figure in the
same book of Paradise Lost, because it exhibits a
less conspicuous technical cunning, may even
better show a poet's care for unity of tone and
impression. Where Satan's prostrate bulk is

compared to

that sea-beast

Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream,

the picture that follows of the Norse-pilot moor-
ing his boat under the lee of the monster is
completed in a line that attunes the mind once
more to all the pathos and gloom of those in-
fernal deeps :

while night
Invests the sea, and wished morn delays.

So masterly a handling of the figures which
usage and taste prescribe to learned writers is
rare indeed. The ordinary small scholar disposes
of his baggage less happily. Having heaped up
knowledge as a successful tradesman heaps up
money, he is apt to believe that his wealth makes
him free of the company of letters, and a fellow-
craftsman of the poets. The mark of his style

Style 103

is an excessive and pretentious allusiveness. It was
he whom the satirist designed in that taunt, Scire
tuum nikil est nisi te scire hoc sciat alter — "My
knowledge of thy knowledge is the knowledge
thou covetest." His allusions and learned peri-
phrases elucidate nothing; they put an idle
labour on the reader who understands them, and
extort from baffled ignorance, at which, perhaps,
they are more especially aimed, a foolish admira-
tion. These tricks and vanities, the very corrup-
tion of ornament, will always be found while the
power to acquire knowledge is more general than
tl^ strength to carry it or the skill to wield it.
The collector has his proper work to do in the
commonwealth of learning, but the ownership of
a museum is a poor qualification for the name of
artist. Knowledge has two good uses ; it may be
frankly communicated for the benefit of others, or
it may minister matter to thought; an allusive
writer often robs it of both these functions.
He must needs display his possessions and his
modesty at one and the same time, producing his
treasures unasked, and huddling them in uncouth

104 Style

fashion past the gaze of the spectator, because,
forsooth, he would not seem to make a rarity of
them. The subject to be treated, the groundwork
to be adorned, becomes the barest excuse for a
profitless haphazard ostentation. This fault is
very incident to the scholarly style, which often
sacrifices emphasis and conviction to a futile air of
encyclopaedic grandeur.
implicity Those who are repelled by this redundance of

and

Strength, ornament, from which even great writers are not
wholly exempt, have sometimes been driven by
the force of reaction into a singular fallacy. The
futility of these literary quirks and graces has
induced them to lay art under the same interdict
with ornament. Style and stylists, one will say,
have no attraction for him, he had rather hear
honest men utter their thoughts directly, clearly,
and simply. The choice of words, says another,
and the conscious manipulation of sentences, is
literary foppery ; the word that first offers is
commonly the best, and the order in which the
thoughts occur is the order to be followed. Be
natural, be straightforward, they urge, and what

Style 105

you have to say will say itself in the best possible
manner. It is a welcome lesson, no doubt, that
these deluded Arcadians teach. A simple and
direct style — who would not give his all to pur-
chase that ! But is it in truth so easy to be
compassed ? The greatest writers, when they are
at the top of happy hours, attain to it, now and
again. Is all this tangled contrariety of things a
kind of fairyland, and does the writer, alone
among men, find that a beaten foot-path opens
out before him as he goes, to lead him, straight
through the maze, to the goal of his desires ? To
think so is to build a childish dream out of facts
imperfectly observed, and worthy of a closer
observation. Sometimes the cry for simplicity is
the reverse of what it seems, and is uttered by
those who had rather hear words used in their
habitual vague acceptations than submit to the
cutting directness of a good writer. Habit makes
obscurity grateful, and the simple style, in this
view, is the style that allows thought to run
automatically into its old grooves and burrows.
The original writers who have combined real

106 Style

literary power with the heresy of ease and nature
are of another kind. A brutal personality, ex-
cellently muscular, snatching at words as the
handiest weapons wherewith to inflict itself, and
the whole body of its thoughts and preferences,
on suffering humanity, is likely enough to deride
the daintiness of conscious art. Such a writer is
William Cobbett, who has often been praised for
the manly simplicity of his style, which he raised
into a kind of creed. His power is undeniable ;
his diction, though he knew it not, both choice
and chaste ; yet page after page of his writing
suggests only the reflection that here is a prodigal
waste of good English. He bludgeons all he
touches, and spends the same monotonous em-
phasis on his dislike of tea and on his hatred of
the Government. His is the simplicity of a crude
and violent mind, concerned only with giving
forcible expression to its unquestioned prejudices.
^ Irrelevance, the besetting sin of the ill-educated,
he glories in, so that his very weakness puts on the
semblance of strength, and helps to wield the
hammer.

Style 107

It is not to be denied that there is a native The

Of

force of temperament which can make itself felt Letters.
even through illiterate carelessness. "Literary
gentlemen, editors, and critics," says Thoreau,
himself by no means a careless writer, "think
that they know how to write, because they have
studied grammar and rhetoric ; but they are
egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is
as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle,
and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater
force behind them." This true saying introduces
us to the hardest problem of criticism, the paradox
of literature, the stumbling-block of rhetoricians.
To analyse the precise method whereby a great
personality can make itself felt in words, even
while it neglects and contemns the study of words,
would be to lay bare the secrets of religion and
life — it is beyond human competence. Neverthe-
less a brief and diffident consideration of the
matter may bring thus much comfort, that the
seeming contradiction is no discredit cast on
letters, but takes its origin rather from too narrow
and pedantic a view of the scope of letters.

108 Style

Drama. Words are things : it is useless to try to set

them in a world apart. They exist in books only
by accident, and for one written there are a
thousand, infinitely more powerful, spoken. They
are deeds : the man who brings word of a lost
battle can work no comparable effect with the
muscles of his arm; lago's breath is as truly
laden with poison and murder as the fangs of the
cobra and the drugs of the assassin. Hence the
sternest education in the use of words is least of
all to be gained in the schools, which cultivate
verbiage in a highly artificial state of seclusion,
A soldier cares little for poetry, because it is the
exercise of power that he loves, and he is accustomed
to do more with his words than give pleasure.
To keep language in immediate touch with reality,
to lade it with action and passion, to utter it hot
from the heart of determination, is to exhibit it
in the plenitude of power. All this may be
achieved without the smallest study of literary
models, and is consistent with a perfect neglect
of literary canons. It is not the logical content
of the word, but the whole mesh of its conditions,

Style 109

including the character, circumstances, and atti-
tude of the speaker, that is its true strength.
" Damn " is often the feeblest of expletives, and
" as you please " may be the dirge of an empire.
Hence it is useless to look to the grammarian, or
1 the critic, for a lesson in strength of style ; the
Jlaws that he has framed, good enough in them-
selves, are current only in his own abstract world.
A breath of hesitancy will sometimes make trash
of a powerful piece of eloquence; and even in
writing, a thing three times said, and each time
said badly, may be of more effect than that terse,
full, and final expression which the doctors rightly
commend. The art of language, regarded as a
question of pattern and cadence, or even as a
question of logic and thought-sequence, is a highly
abstract study; for although, as has been said,
you can do almost anything with words, with
words alone you can do next to nothing. The
realm where speech holds sway is a narrow shoal
or reef, shaken, contorted, and upheaved by vol-
canic action, beaten upon, bounded, and invaded
by the ocean of silence : whoso would be lord of

110 Style

the earth must first tame the fire and the sea. Dra-
matic and narrative writing are happy in this, that
action and silence are a part of their material ;
the story-teller or the playwright can make of
words a background and definition for deeds, a
framework for those silences that are more telling
than any speech. Here lies an escape from the
poverty of content and method to which self-por-
traiture and self-expression are liable; and therefore
are epic and drama rated above all other kinds of.
poetry. The greater force of the objective treat-
ment is witnessed by many essayists and lyrical
poets, whose ambition has led them, sooner or
later, to attempt the novel or the play. There
are weaknesses inherent in all direct self -revela-
tion ; the thing, perhaps, is greatly said, yet there
is no great occasion for the saying of it; a fine
reticence is observed, but it is, after all, an easy
reticence, with none of the dramatic splendours of
reticence on the rack. In the midst of his pleasant
confidences the essayist is brought up short by the
question, "Why must you still be talking?'1
Even the passionate lyric feels the need of ex-

Style Hi

ternal authorisation, and some of the finest of
lyrical poems, like the Willow Song of Desde-
mona, or Wordsworth's Solitary Reaper, are cast

in a dramatic mould, that beauty of diction may ^ -

be vitalised by an imagined situation. More than
others the dramatic art is an enemy to the desul-
tory and the superfluous, sooner than others it
will cast away all formal grace of expression that
it may come home more directly to the business
and bosoms of men. Its great power and scope
are shown well in this, that it can find high uses
for the commonest stuff of daily speech and the
emptiest phrases of daily intercourse.

Simplicity and strength, then, the vigorous implicit
realistic quality of impromptu utterance, and an
immediate relation with the elementary facts of
life, are literary excellences best known in the
drama, and in its modern fellow and rival, the
novel. The dramatist and novelist create their
own characters, set their own scenes, lay their own
plots, and when all has been thus prepared, the
right word is born in the purple, an inheritor of
great opportunities, all its virtues magnified by

112 Style

the glamour of its high estate. Writers on philo-
sophy, morals, or aesthetics, critics, essayists, and
dealers in soliloquy generally, cannot hope, with
their slighter means, to attain to comparable effects.
They work at two removes from life ; the terms
that they handle are surrounded by the vapours of
discussion, and are rewarded by no instinctive
response. Simplicity, in its most regarded sense,
is often beyond their reach ; the matter of their
discourse is intricate, and the most they can do is
to employ patience, care, and economy of labour ;
the meaning of their words is not obvious, and
they must go aside to define it. The strength of
their writing has limits set for it by the nature of
the chosen task, and any transgression of these
limits is punished by a fall into sheer violence.
All writing partakes of the quality of the drama,
there is always a situation involved, the relation,
namely, between the speaker and the hearer. A
gentleman in black, expounding his views, or
narrating his autobiography to the first comer,
can expect no such warmth of response as greets
the dying speech of the baffled patriot; yet he

Style 113

too may take account of the reasons that prompt
speech, may display sympathy and tact, and avoid
the faults of senility. The only character that
can lend strength to his words is his own, and he
sketches it while he states his opinions ; the only
attitude that can ennoble his sayings is implied in
the very arguments he uses. Who does not know
the curious blank effect of eloquence overstrained
or out of place ? The phrasing may be exquisite,
the thought well-knit, the emotion genuine, yet all
is, as it were, dumb-show where no community of
feeling exists between the speaker and his audience.
A similar false note is struck by any speaker or
writer who misapprehends his position or forgets
his disqualifications, by newspaper writers using ^
language that is seemly only in one who stakes
his life on his words, by preachers exceeding the
license of fallibility, by moralists condemning
frailty, by speculative traders deprecating frank
ways of hazard, by Satan rebuking sin.

"How many things are there," exclaims the
wise Verulam, "which a man cannot, with any
face or comeliness, say or do himself! A man's

114 Style

person hath many proper relations which he cannot
put off. A man cannot speak to his son but as a
father; to his wife, but as a husband; to his
enemy but upon terms; whereas a friend may
speak as the case requires, and not as it sorteth
with the person.11 The like " proper relations "
govern writers, even where their audience is un-
known to them. It has often been remarked how
few are the story-tellers who can introduce them-
selves, so much as by a passing reflection or senti-
ment, without a discordant effect. The friend
who saves the situation is found in one and another
of the creatures of their art.

For those who must play their own part the
effort to conceal themselves is of no avail. The
implicit attitude of a writer makes itself felt ; an
undue swelling of his subject to heroic dimensions,
an unwarrantable assumption of sympathy, a tend-
ency to truck with friends or with enemies by the
way, are all possible indications of weakness, which
move even the least skilled of readers to discount
what is said, as they catch here and there a
glimpse of the old pot-companion, or the young

Style 115

dandy, behind the imposing literary mask. Strong V
writers are those who, with every reserve of power,
seek no exhibition of strength. It is as if language
could not come by its full meaning save on the
lips of those who regard it as an evil necessity.
Every word is torn from them, as from a reluctant
witness. They come to speech as to a last resort,
when all other ways have failed. The bane of a y
literary education is that it induces talkativeness,
and an over-weening confidence in words. But
those whose words are stark and terrible seem
almost to despise words.

With words literature begins, and to words it
must return. Coloured by the neighbourhood of
silence, solemnised by thought or steeled by action,
words are still its only means of rising above'
words. " Accedat verbum ad elernentum" said St.
Ambrose, " etjiat sacramentum" So the elementary
passions, pity and love, wrath and terror, are not in
themselves poetical ; they must be wrought upon by
the word to become poetry. In no other way can
suffering be transformed to pathos, or horror reach
its apotheosis in tragedy.

116 Style

Quotation. When all has been said, there remains a residue
capable of no formal explanation. Language, this
array of conventional symbols loosely strung
together, and blown about by every wandering
breath, is miraculously vital and expressive,
justifying not a few of the myriad superstitions
that have always attached to its use. The
same words are free to all, yet no wealth or
distinction of vocabulary is needed for a group of
words to take the stamp of an individual mind
and character. " As a quality of style," says Mr.
Pater, "soul is a fact." To resolve how words,
like bodies, become transparent when they are
inhabited by that luminous reality, is a higher
pitch than metaphysic wit can fly. Ardent per-
suasion and deep feeling enkindle words, so that
the weakest take on glory. The humblest and
most despised of common phrases may be the
chosen vessel for the next avatar of the spirit. It
is the old problem, to be met only by the old
solution of the Platonist, that

Soul is form, and doth the body make.
The soul is able to inform language by some

Style 117

strange means other than the choice and arrange-
ment of words and phrases. Real novelty of
vocabulary is impossible; in the matter of lan-
guage we lead a parasitical existence, and are '
always quoting. Quotations, conscious or uncon-
scious, vary in kind according as the mind is
active to work upon them and make them its own.
In its grossest and most servile form quotation is a
lazy folly ; a thought has received some signal or
notorious expression, and as often as the old sense,
or something like it, recurs, the old phrase rises to
the lips. This degenerates to simple phrase-
mongering, and those who practise it are not
vigilantly jealous of their meaning. Such an
expression as "fine by degrees and beautifully
less" is often no more than a bloated equivalent
for a single word — say "diminishing'1' or
" shrinking." Quotations like this are the warts
and excremental parts of language ; the borrowings
of good writers are never thus superfluous, their
quotations are appropriations. Whether it be by
some witty turn given to a well-known line, by an
original setting for an old saw, or by a new and

118 Style

unlooked-for analogy, the stamp of the borrower
is put upon the goods he borrows, and he becomes
part owner. Plagiarism is a crime only where
writing is a trade ; expression need never be bound
by the law of copyright while it follows thought, for
thought, as some great thinker has observed, is
free. The words were once Shakespeare's ; if only
you can feel them as he did, they are yours now
no less than his. The best quotations, the best
translations, the best thefts, are all equally new
and original works. From quotation, at least,
there is no escape, inasmuch as we learn language
from others. All common phrases that do the
dirty work of the world are quotations — poor
things, and not our own. Who first said that a
book would "repay perusal,"" or that any gay
scene was "bright with all the colours of the
rainbow " ? There is no need to condemn these
phrases, for language has a vast deal of inferior
work to do. The expression of thought, tempera-
ment, attitude, is not the whole of its business.
It is only a literary fop or doctrinaire who will
attempt to remint all the small defaced coinage

Style 119

that passes through his hands, only a lisping
young fantastico who will refuse all conventional
garments and all conventional speech. At a
modern wedding the frock-coat is worn, the
presents are ".numerous and costly," and there is
an " ovation accorded to the happy pair."
These things are part of our public civilisation, a
decorous and accessible uniform, not to be lightly
set aside. But let it be a friend of your own who
is to many, a friend of your own who dies, and
you are to express yourself — the problem is
changed, you feel all the difficulties of the art of
style, and fathom something of the depth of your
unskill. Forbidden silence, we should be in a
poor way indeed.

Single words too we plagiarise, when we use

tiott*
them without realisation and mastery of their

meaning. The best argument for a succinct style
is this, that if you use words you do not need, or
do not understand, you cannot use them well. It
is not what a word means, but what it means to
you, that is of the deepest import. Let it be a
weak word, with a poor history behind it, if you

120 Style

have done good thinking with it, you may yet use
it to surprising advantage. But if, on the other
hand, it be a strong word that has never aroused
more than a misty idea and a flickering emotion
in your mind, here lies your danger. You may
use it, for there is none to hinder ; and it will
betray you. The commonest Saxon words prove
explosive machines in the hands of rash impotence.
It is perhaps a certain uneasy consciousness of
danger, a suspicion that weakness of soul cannot
wield these strong words, that makes debility avoid
them, committing itself rather, as if by some
pre-established affinity, to the vaguer Latinised
vocabulary. Yet they are not all to be avoided,
and their quality in practice will depend on some
occult ability in their employer. For every living
person, if the material were obtainable, a separate
historical dictionary might be compiled, recording
where each word was first heard or seen, where
and how it was first used. The references are
utterly beyond recovery; but such a register
would throw a strange light on individual
styles. The eloquent trifler, whose stock of words

Style 121

has been accumulated by a pair of light fingers,
would stand denuded of his plausible pretences as
soon as it were seen how roguishly he came by his
eloquence. There may be literary quality, it is
well to remember, in the words of a parrot, if
only its cage has been happily placed ; meaning
and soul there cannot be. Yet the voice will
sometimes be mistaken, by the carelessness of
chance listeners, for a genuine utterance of
humanity ; and the like is true in literature.
But writing cannot be luminous and great save in
the hands of those whose words are their own by
the indefeasible title of conquest. Life is spent in
learning the meaning of great words, so that some
idle proverb, known for years and accepted
perhaps as a truism, comes home, on a day,
like a blow. "If there were not a God," said
Voltaire, " it would be necessary to invent him.""
Voltaire had therefore a right to use the word,
but some of those who use it most, if they would
be perfectly sincere, should enclose it in quotation
marks. Whole nations go for centuries without
coining names for certain virtues ; is it credible

122 Style

that among other peoples, where the names exist,
the need for them is epidemic ? The author of
the Ecclesiastical Polity puts a bolder and truer
face on the matter. "Concerning that Faith,
Hope, and Charity," he writes, "without which
there can be no salvation, was there ever any
mention made saving only in that Law which
God himself hath from Heaven revealed ? There
is not in the world a syllable muttered with
certain truth concerning any of these three, more
than hath been supernaturally received from
the mouth of the eternal God." Howsoever they
came to us, we have the words ; they, and many
other terms of tremendous import, are bandied
about from mouth to mouth and alternately
enriched or impoverished in meaning. Is the
"Charity" of St. Paul's Epistle one with the
charity of "charity-blankets"? Are the "cru-
sades" of Godfrey and of the great St. Louis,
where knightly achievement did homage to the
religious temper, essentially the same as that
process of harrying the wretched and the outcast
for which the muddle-headed, greasy citizen of

Style 123

to-day invokes the same high name ? Of a truth,
some kingly words fall to a lower estate than
Nebuchadnezzar.

Here, among words, our lot is cast, to make or The World

of Words.

mar. It is in this obscure thicket, overgrown
with weeds, set with thorns, and haunted by
shadows, this World of Words, as the Elizabethans
finely called it, that we wander, eternal pioneers,
during the course of our mortal lives. To be
overtaken by a master, one who comes along with
the gaiety of assured skill and courage, with the
gravity of unflinching purpose, to make the
crooked ways straight and the rough places plain,
is to gain fresh confidence from despair. He
twines wreaths of the entangling ivy, and builds
ramparts of the thorns. He blazes his mark upon
the secular oaks, as a guidance to later travellers,
and coaxes flame from heaps of mouldering rubbish.
There is no sense of cheer like this. Sincerity,
clarity, candour, power, seem real once more,
real and easy. In the light of great literary
achievement, straight and wonderful, like the
roads of the ancient Romans, barbarism torments

124 Style

the mind like a riddle. Yet there are the dusky
barbarians ! — fleeing from the harmonious tread
of the ordered legions, running to hide them-
selves in the morass of vulgar sentiment, to
ambush their nakedness in the sand-pits of low
thought.

The Teach- It is a venerable custom to knit up the specula-

ing of Style.

tive consideration of any subject with the counsels
of practical wisdom. The words of this essay have
been vain indeed if the idea that style may be
imparted by tuition has eluded them, and sur-
vived. There is a useful art of Grammar, which
takes for its province the right and the wrong in
speech. Style deals only with what is permissible
to all, and even revokes, on occasion, the rigid
laws of Grammar or countenances offences against
them. Yet no one is a better judge of equity
for ignorance of the law, and grammatical practice
offers a fair field wherein to acquire ease, accuracy,
j and versatility. The formation of sentences, the
\ sequence of verbs, the marshalling of the ranks of
'auxiliaries are all, in a sense, to be learned. There

Style 125

is a kind of inarticulate disorder to which writers
are liable, quite distinct from a bad style, and
caused chiefly by lack of exercise. An unpractised
writer will sometimes send a beautiful and power-
ful phrase jostling along in the midst of a clumsy
sentence — like a crowned king escorted by a
mob.

But Style cannot be taught. Imitation of the /
masters, or of some one chosen master, and the
constant purging of language by a severe criticism,
have their uses, not to be belittled; they have
also their dangers. The greater part of what is
called the teaching of style must always be nega- 0
tive, bad habits may be broken down, old mal-
practices prohibited. The pillory and the stocks
are hardly educational agents, but they make it
easier for honest men to enjoy their own. If style
could really be taught, it is a question whether its
teachers should not be regarded as mischief-makers
and enemies of mankind. The Rosicrucians pro-
fessed to have found the philosopher's stone, and
the shadowy sages of modern Thibet are said, by
those who speak for them, to have compassed the

126 Style

instantaneous transference of bodies from place to
place. In either case, the holders of these secrets
have laudably refused to publish them, lest avarice
and malice should run amuck in human society.
A similar fear might well visit the conscience of
one who should dream that he had divulged to
the world at large what can be done with language.
Of this there is no danger; rhetoric, it is true,
does put fluency, emphasis, and other warlike
equipments at the disposal of evil forces, but
style, like the Christian religion, is one of those
open secrets which are most easily and most effect-
ively kept by the initiate from age to age. Divina-
tion is the only means of access to these mysteries.
The formal attempt to impart a good style is like
the melancholy task of the teacher of gesture and
oratory ; some palpable faults are soon corrected ;
and, for the rest, a few conspicuous mannerisms,
a few theatrical postures, not truly expressive, and
a high tragical strut, are all that can be imparted.
The truth of the old Roman teachers of rhetoric
is here witnessed afresh, to be a good orator it is
first of all necessary to be a good man. Good

Style 127

style is the greatest, of revealers, — it lays bare the
soul. The soul of the cheat shuns nothing so
much. "Always be ready to speak your mind,"
said Blake, "and a base man will avoid you.""
But to insist that he also shall speak his mind is
to go a step further, it is to take from the im-
postor his wooden leg, to prohibit his lucrative
whine, his mumping and his canting, to force the
poor silly soul to stand erect among its fellows
and declare itself. His occupation is gone, and
he does not love the censor who deprives him of
the weapons of his mendicity.

All style is gesture, the gesture of the mind ' The
and of the soul. Mind we have in common, inas-
much as the laws of right reason are not different
for different minds. Therefore clearness and*
arrangement can be taught, sheer incompetence in
the art of expression can be partly remedied. But
who shall impose laws upon the soul ? It is thus
of common note that one may dislike or even
hate a particular style while admiring its facility,
its strength, its skilful adaptation to the matter
set forth. Milton, a chaster and more unerring

128 Style

master of the art than Shakespeare, reveals no
such lovable personality. While persons count
for much, style, the index to persons, can never
count for little. " Speak," it has been said, " that
I may know you" — voice -gesture is more than
feature. Write, and after you have attained to
some control over the instrument, you write your-
self down whether you will or no. There is no
vice, however unconscious, no virtue, however shy,
no touch of meanness or of generosity in your
character, that will not pass . on to the paper.
You anticipate the Day of Judgment and furnish
the recording angel with material. The Art of
Criticism in literature, so often decried and given
a subordinate place among the arts, is none other
than the art of reading and interpreting these
written evidences. Criticism has been popularly
opposed to creation, perhaps because the kind of
creation that it attempts is rarely achieved, and
so the world forgets that the main business of
Criticism, after all, is not to legislate, nor to
classify, but to raise the dead. Graves, at its
command, have waked their sleepers, oped, and

Style 129

let them forth. It is by the creative power of
this art that the living man is reconstructed from
the litter of blurred and fragmentary paper docu-
ments that he has left to posterity.

THE END

Printed by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

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STUDIES IN EAELY VICTORIAN
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VICTORIAN LITERATURE.
LORD MACAULAY.
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CHARLES DICKENS.

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SELECT ESSAYS OF SAINTE-BEUVE

CHIEFLY BEARING ON ENGLISH LITERATURE.

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